


Dreams of War, Dreams of Liars

by teaberryblue



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: 616 plot elements, Action, Alternate Universe - Fusion, Angst, Capwolf, Character Study, Comic/Movie Fusion, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, DreamVision, Dreams, Dreams vs. Reality, Fusion - Inception, Humor, Identity Issues, M/M, Marvel 616/MCU Crossover, Midnight Racer, Post-Winter Soldier, Romance, Subconscious, canon-compliant AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-30
Updated: 2014-12-30
Packaged: 2018-03-04 03:37:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 34,438
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2907923
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/teaberryblue/pseuds/teaberryblue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Steve succumbs to a malevolent attack that puts him permanently to sleep, the only way to wake him up is to unearth a technology that hasn't been used in twenty years.</p><p>Welcome back to Dreamvision, Tony Stark.</p><p> </p><p>  <i>This is an MCU canon-compliant story that incorporates the science of <span class="u">Inception</span>, rather than a straight-up AU or crossover.<i></i></i></p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue: Enter Sandman (1992)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [grue](https://archiveofourown.org/users/grue/gifts).



> Thank you to my excellent betas: TheLiterator, GreyPrince, greenjudy, alephz, rainproof, and eschatologies!
> 
> Thanks grue for a better prompt than I ever imagined, and the cap-ironman mods for matching me up so perfectly. 
> 
> Also many thanks to the regular crowd in the #cap-im IRC for lots of backpats and cheerleading! 
> 
> And here's another gift to go along with the fic: [Dreams of War, Dreams of Liars Soundtrack](http://open.spotify.com/user/teaberryblue/playlist/5hgpwlXXt35MgIn3gyTliR) on Spotify.

“Wake up,” Tony muttered to himself, under his breath. “You need to wake up.”

His shoulder was bleeding badly; he could feel the last of his energy ebbing; swimming away from him like waves of radiation from an unstable element. 

The blood was dripping down his bare chest from a long, narrow gash across his collarbone, his legs lying at gruesome angles that told him they’d certainly been crushed. 

"Why are you doing this?" Tony asked, panting... "What..."

But the words were slipping away from him. 

Ty grinned at him, teeth suddenly bestial: how had he not noticed before? But he was pinned under the collapsed column like helpless prey. 

_Wake up,_ Tony said to himself. _Just wake up._ He reached for his pocket, found it sewn into the folds of the bloodied loincloth that was his only garment, and fumbled for the disc he kept there, the tiny toy shield, and he rubbed his fingertip over the star motif imprinted in the plastic. He tossed it in the air, watching it intently. 

But Ty laughed and kicked the shield away, bearing down on Tony with an enormous sword, resplendent in his golden armor. 

And then the sword began to twist, opening into the head of a dragon, screaming and snarling fire as it descended upon its victim. But Tony couldn't look at it; he was transfixed by the gloating expression on his oldest friend's face.

Around them, the roars of the crowd swelled into a frenzy. The sun glanced off Ty's armor, momentarily blinding Tony. 

In the brilliance, everything went white. This wasn't real; this couldn't be real. Dragons? A gladiatorial arena?

"This isn't real," he whispered to himself, and he thrust out an arm, catching at the tiny plastic shield that was still careening through the air. 

But his skin contacted metal, cool and firm and fitting to his arm like he was born to carry a shield. A full, properly-sized shield, so that when the dragon struck, its flames glanced off harmlessly. Tony slammed the shield forward; the dragon reared back howling.

The crowd screamed for blood; the dragon pawed at the air, poised to attack. Tony, in that moment, fed all of his will into his damaged legs, into the heavy marble column that immobilized him. When the dragon roared, he pushed the column upright, and stood, and threw the shield, whipping it with all his strength. It spun through the air like he’d seen so many times in the pages of comics, whirling toward the dragon’s gold-scaled neck.

He couldn’t watch. He flinched, shying away from the impact, but he could hear the collective gasp of the crowd, and when he looked back at Ty, Ty stood aghast, blue eyes wide, jaw agape, fingers flexing into fists. He sneered, and looked pointedly at Tony’s new costume.

“Of _course_ it would be Captain America,” he said in a derisive tone, eyes dropping from the star adorning Tony’s chest to the red and white stripes at his waist. “Still not over that pathetic schoolboy crush, are you?” 

The shield returned to Tony’s arm as if by magic, and he held it close to his chest. “What are you doing, Ty?” he asked again. “Why are you doing this?” 

The crowd, seeing the dragon defeated, were becoming restless. A few of them called for blood again, and others began to crawl over the barriers and into the arena-- Ty’s projections, certainly. Tony stepped back, cautious. 

“For fuck’s sake, Tony, it’s just a game,” Ty answered. “You can’t really think I’d _let_ you get hurt, can you? It’s all in good fun. We’re safer here than we’d ever be out there.” 

Tony lowered the shield, but kept his distance. “I don’t know what to think, Ty. But this isn’t my kind of fun.” He pulled a revolver from the belt at his waist, holding it up to his head. 

Ty smiled, but it was a thin, cruel smile, and he drew a sharp knife, the hilt a lion’s head with ruby eyes, raising it to his own throat. “Fine,” he said. “Go back. Deal with the lawyers, and the Board of Directors, and the paparazzi out for your blood.” 

Tony fired the gun.

* * *

Tony woke up. He stared out at the ocean, deep grey-green and calm. The sun was beating down on his back; he pulled his knees to his chest. 

Ty’s shadow darkened the ground before him, he looked up. 

“Don’t be mad,” Ty said. “I was only trying to help.” 

“Help?” Tony demanded. He stood up, picked up a smooth, flat stone, skipped it out on the calm water, so it skimmed and hopped four, five, six times. He smiled, impressed. “How do imaginary dragons help?” 

“You’re not thinking about your parents,” Ty pointed out.

Tony turned and scowled. “Maybe I want to think about them.” 

“That’s a lie,” Ty said. 

Tony felt his throat close up, his eyes sting, threatening tears. 

Ty stepped over, put his hands on Tony’s shoulders, drew him in closer. Tony let him, inhaling the scent of shaving cream and Ivory soap. 

“Let me take care of you,” Ty said. “Let’s go inside. I’ll bring you dinner in bed; we’ll take all the phones off the hook.” 

Tony sucked in a sob and nodded. “No more dreams, though,” he said. 

“No more dreams,” Ty agreed. “I’m sorry.” 

Tony felt for the plastic shield in his pocket, closing his hand around it as Ty led him up the walk to the house. He drew it out, turned it around in his fingers. 

“Watch the--” Ty started, but it was too late. Tony was too absorbed in thought, he forgot about the jagged spot in the walkway where the stone path had broken. He tripped, stubbing his toe, and fell to the ground, just barely catching himself, scraping an elbow against the stone. 

He lost his grip on the shield, and it bounced away from him. 

“Shit, T,” said Ty. He dropped to a knee, offering Tony a hand up. “You okay?” 

_Bounced_. Tony squinted at the shield. It had never bounced before. He picked it up, dropped it again. 

“Come on, T,” said Ty, as he put his other hand on Tony’s back. “What are you…”

Tony snatched the shield, backing away from his friend. “ _Where are we?_ ” he whispered.


	2. Secret Agent Man

"It was an accident," Tony said, his voice thin, weepy, almost.

Don't cry, he thought. God, don't cry in front of Howard.

His heart thumped, louder and louder, threatening to burst from his ribcage, until he was certain his father could hear it. 

"You got cocky, kid," Howard scolded. "You weren't looking over your shoulder."

Anger rose in his chest, as if there were room for anything else in his chest, the weight of the reactor solid and heavy and painful. He wheezed and caught at the little plastic shield in his pocket, turning it over in his fingers. "Whose shoulder, Dad?" Tony demanded. "Whose shoulder do I need to look over? You never let me in on any of your secrets; you’re the one who let things get out of control.” 

"I was building your future," Howard replied, and he reached out with a liver-spotted hand, large and...impossibly long, reaching for the reactor in Tony's chest. 

Tony tried to back away, but he found himself paralyzed, the wood of the chair growing shoots that twined around his arms and held him in place.

Howard's fingers clamped onto the arc reactor, twisted.

"If you detest my legacy so much, I'll take this back," Howard said, his voice hissing serpentine on the sibilants.

He pulled the reactor from Tony's chest; it disengaged with a pop, and Tony's entire chest exploded, the wires of the reactor twisting around the tissue of his heart and pulling it, red and blue and gushing blood, still beating, dangling it in front of Tony's eyes.

With his last breath, Tony screamed, and then "Secret Agent Man," by Johnny Rivers began to play.

* * *

Tony woke up. He was dripping sweat, and glared at his phone, still tinkling away, Agent— No, it was Director, now— _Director_ Coulson's number flashing on the screen.

The door slid open a moment later, and Pepper stood, expression drawn, in the doorway. “Tony?" she asked.

Tony raked his hands through his hair, reached for the glass at his bedside, splashing some-- well, whiskey on his face, which hadn't been his intention and didn't really help do anything but make his skin mildly sticky. 

“Everything okay, Pep?" Tony asked, as he rubbed the whiskey off his face with the hem of his tee shirt. 

She nodded. “Fine, Tony, but you—“ She trailed off; her tone was strained.

Tony didn't know what strained meant under the circumstances. Strained could mean she was worried about him; that was good, right? 

"I alerted Miss Potts to the spike in your vitals as requested, Sir," said JARVIS. "You were..."

"I know what I was doing, J," Tony said. He frowned, searching Pepper's eyes for some answer. "Take a vacation, Pep," he said. "Use the St. Maarten place. Go--"

"I can't," she said. “I’m still your CEO, remember?"

Tony squeezed the bridge of his nose.

"I'm trying--" Pepper said, her skin reddening, betraying her emotions. "I'm trying to run interference while you take time to recover, but the phone's ringing off the hook, everyone's--"

And as if on cue, 'Secret Agent Man' piped up again. 

"Take the call, Tony," said Pepper.

Tony groaned. "It's SHIELD."

"I can tell it's SHIELD from the ringtone, Tony," Pepper replied. "You really need to take that call."

"What? Tony asked. "You know what this is about."

"I do," said Pepper. "JARVIS? Illuminate Tony?"

"Naturally, Miss Potts." 

Tony ran his hands over his face, groaning, and dragged his legs over the edge of the bed.

"Why are you jingling?" Pepper asked.

"Uh."

Tony looked down at his festive boxer briefs. "Jingle balls?"

He scratched at the holly.

"May I suggest, Sir," said JARVIS, "that you rotate the holiday underwear out of your regular wardrobe after January Fifth, being the Feast of the Epiphany on the Christian calendar?"

Tony groaned. "What day is it?" He asked.

"It's June, Tony," Pepper said softly. 

Tony rubbed at his scarred, reactorless sternum, and reached for the little plastic shield on his bedside table. It was pitted, the paint worn away after twenty-five years, so that it was solid red. He turned it over in his fingers as JARVIS projected a news clip on the wall.

"...the theft of a cache of stolen Cold War documents, weaponry and other possessions of the U.S. Government that had been squirreled away in a Stark Industries warehouse, once again leading to questions from the public about Howard Stark's relationship with SHIELD and the recently-uncovered HYDRA shadow organization. The public wants to know whether Stark Industries benefited unethically from its ties to SHIELD."

The screen cut to a man on the street segment, where a plump, pretty young woman with braided hair and a baby on her hip looked concerned. "I think we have a right to know," she said. "Tony Stark is up there flying around being Iron Man and we trust him with our lives, but how do we know he wasn't working for HYDRA, too?"

They cut to a stiff-looking man in a suit. “This certainly looks incriminating for Stark Industries, who were also involved in the construction of the SHIELD helicarriers built as part of Project Insight, destroyed earlier this year. We’ll have more in a minute, but--” 

"Fuck," said Tony. "Turn it off, J. I don't have time for this."

"Tony," Pepper said. "This is all you have time for."

"Where did this come from?" Tony asked. "Who knew about this? I didn't even know about this."

"Talk to Phil, Tony," 

The next time 'Secret Agent Man' played on the phone, Tony answered it. 

"Hey, Director Lazarus," Tony said cheerily, putting the call on speakerphone so that Pepper could hear.

"How's life without a hunk of metal in your chest treating you?” Phil asked. He was shouting into the phone; Tony could hear loud, rushing sounds in the background. 

"Been worse," Tony answered. "A lot, lot worse."

"You didn't have any more madcap birthdays while I was gone?" asked Phil.

"No," Tony answered. "It was a quiet one. Just me and--" he looked uncomfortably at Pepper, images flashing through his mind: her crying on the sofa, long stretches of strained conversation, _him_ crying on the sofa, both of them crying on the sofa until DUM-E attempted to cheer them up by burning microwave popcorn and pouring more of it on their laps than in the bowl. "Just me." 

"Look," said Phil. "We've got a whole mess of files here, some things--" 

"How did you get access?" Tony asked. "I thought you folks were flying under the radar these days."

“I’ve got someone on the inside at the CIA," Phil answered. "She's been looking after things."

* * *

"This," said Sharon, the young, pretty CIA agent standing in front of Tony, "is what we recovered from the warehouse."

Tony flicked on his hand-scanner, began importing the documents into JARVIS' database. 

"It's all Project Rebirth," he said, after a moment. "Shit."

He glanced to Phil, then Bruce, who was sitting impassively at Tony's side, arms crossed over his chest, then at the others in the room: Natasha, who seemed more agitated than he'd ever seen her, tapping a foot, and that Wilson guy he'd met only once, years ago, when they'd been developing the EXO-Falcon project. He remembered liking the guy's calm, no-nonsense manner then, and it had given him more confidence in Steve's ability to select a team on his own when he saw that he and Rhodey had both chosen the same guy.

There had been a palpable tension in the room, beyond the tension that usually went along with folks being pissed off with him, and he realized that the most notable absence in the room wasn’t a coincidence. 

He opened the files on his StarkPad, but he was too preoccupied with a single question. 

He looked to Phil first, but as he opened his mouth, he settled on Sharon, turned his attention on the woman directing the meeting. “Agent Carter?” he asked. “If we’re talking about Project Rebirth, where the hell is Cap?” 

The room went silent, the sound swallowed up as if in a vacuum.

Sharon pursed her lips, and someone shuffled their feet-- Tony almost thought it might be Natasha, but that wasn't likely, was it?

"Mr. Stark--"

"Well?" 

And he heard a little choked sound-- _definitely_ Natasha, because in the next moment, Natasha murmured, "excuse me," and walked, quickly, with long strides, from the room.

"Some of the information--"

Tony wasn't paying attention to Sharon anymore; he was fixated on the door, which hadn't quite shut entirely on Natasha's exit. 

Wilson was on his feet, up like a shot, but hadn't made any move.

Tony put a hand up in the air. "Excuse me, Agent," he said, and followed Natasha.

* * *

Natasha was sitting in the hall a few meters away from the door, her head resting on her knees, her arms wrapped around her legs, and her shoulders shook, her face hidden by tousled red hair.

"Nat?" Tony asked, and he sank to the floor beside her. He checked his pockets-- wallet, phone, little plastic shield...and then he found a little baggie of trail mix. 

"Beautiful," he said, and he munched on some sunflower seeds. "You okay, Nat? Want a snack?"

She stopped shaking and looked up; her expression unreadable, her eyes surprisingly empty of tears. "It was a calculation on my part," she said, calmly, as she took a handful of trail mix. "I knew you'd follow me if I appeared to be upset."

"You're not upset?" Tony asked.

She gave him another of her inscrutable, wide-eyed looks. "You know I am."

"What happened to Cap?"

"There was a kill switch," Natasha said, so quiet that it was as if she were breathing the words.

"Come again, Nat?" Tony asked. "Sounded like you said 'kill switch.'"

Natasha pressed her lips together, her little heart-shaped mouth disappearing in a thin line. "I released all that data, Stark," she said softly. "I didn't know what it contained. I thought-- it was dirty secrets, the kind of thing-- it would only hurt people who had something to hide, wouldn't it?"

Her shoulders tightened; she rubbed her temples. "Me," she said softly. "It was supposed to hurt me."

A wave of chill ran over Tony; his throat went paper-dry, and he coughed into one hand as he reached for his plastic shield with the other. 

He pulled the toy from his pocket, cupped his palm around it, a gesture he'd made so many times that he did it without thinking. "Are you saying he's dead, Nat? Is that why everyone's being so cagey?"

She shook her head. "He's not dead," she answered. "I released those files," she said.

"And someone used them to track good old Dad's secret hidey-hole," Tony deduced. "And there was something about a kill switch."

"Tied to the serum," Natasha answered. "In case-- it was all experimental, Stark," she said slowly. "They didn't know--"

"If the guy they'd give it to was gonna turn out to be a sanctimonious asshole who won't play by anyone's rules but his own?" Tony asked, cheery. 

Natasha gave him a rather humorless look.

"I'm just saying," Tony added, as apologetic as he could be without actually apologizing. "It does take one to know one."

"They didn't know they were only getting one soldier," Natasha said. "You know this. They were planning for an army. You can't build a superhuman army without--"

"Taking precautions, yeah, I know," Tony agreed. "Believe me, the concept hasn't escaped the guy whose smoothie blender just finished a Master’s degree in theoretical mathematics over the internet.” 

Natasha smiled slightly at that, and Tony considered it a win. He took another handful of trail mix. 

“So, Erskine and my dad tweaked the serum so they could deactivate it if everything went to hell in a handbasket, is what you’re saying?” he asked. 

Natasha nodded. “Somebody found something in that warehouse that let them activate it. Stark, he’s--” She bit her lip. “His methods are erratic. He goes into danger without backup. He’s not grounded. He’s--” She gritted her teeth. “He’s the worst partner I’ve ever had. He’s also the best. I have to help him.” 

“What, so he’s back to being some scrappy little guy?” Tony shrugged. “Nat, you know Steve and I didn’t exactly hit it off, but he might be better off that way, don’t you think? I’ve kinda had the feeling this whole-- you know, everything-- it just _eats_ at him.”

She shook her head. “No, Stark, it’s not that, it didn’t revert the serum…” 

And Tony could hear the quiver in her voice, and he reached up, and patted her shoulder, a little bit lamely. He was bad enough at comforting people in general; the idea of comforting Natasha was downright intimidating. “So what’s wrong, Nat?”

“He’s asleep,” said Wilson, as his shadow darkened the floor where they sat. Tony started; he hadn’t heard the man approach. 

“He’s been asleep for three days,” Natasha replied. 

“So, it’s Cap,” Tony pointed out. “He’ll snap out of it.” Even as he said it, he knew he sounded callously casual, and Natasha’s face went carefully blank again, back to its usual guarded mask. In that moment, Tony felt quietly guilty; he felt as if he’d somehow opened a door and then closed it. 

“Look, I’m no doctor,” said Wilson, leaning back against the wall, still hovering over Tony and Natasha. “But he hasn’t responded to anything, not yet.” 

Tony shivered. He shoved the trail mix back in his pocket and reached for the toy shield, pressing a fingertip to the star in the center. “Okay,” he said, and he pushed himself back up the wall. “Okay, I--” 

He held a hand out for Natasha, to help her up, and to his surprise, she took it. 

“I’ve got this,” he said, softly, reassuringly. He pulled out his phone, tapped a few buttons, and, after a moment’s hesitation, requested that JARVIS scan the new files. “My dad wouldn’t-- He was big on failsafes. I don’t know anything about the doc he worked with, but Howard Stark wouldn’t just let something go that could leave an entire potential army comatose.”

“That’s the nicest thing I’ve ever heard you say about your father,” Natasha said. 

“It’s probably the nicest thing I have said about him,” Tony replied. “JARVIS, I want the data from Cap’s little ice-capade, too, brainwaves, whatever you can find. Where’s he being held?” 

“I’ve got him,” Sharon said, stepping into the doorway. 

“You mean the CIA has him?” Tony asked. “Nope. I need him in my labs. No bureaucrats smelling up the joint.” He leveled a distrustful look at her. “That includes you.” 

“Jesus, you’re as insufferable as Steve says you--” 

And Tony realized where he’d heard her name before. “Are you the girl he was dating?” he asked, squinting at her. “You’re nothing like I ima--” 

Sharon smacked her forehead with her hand. “We had coffee. Once. Try to stay on task, especially if you’re kicking me out of whatever it is you’re about to do?” 

Tony snorted. “Oh, I like you,” he said. “Find a way to transport Cap,” he said. “I don’t want any questions from the press. Nobody can know he’s there. JARVIS, once he’s hooked up to my machines; I want you to run a differential report on what you’re getting now versus what SHIELD got when he was thawing out.” 

“You can take Barton,” Natasha said to Sharon.

“We have Barton?” Tony asked. “No one told me we had Barton.”

“That’s because he’s with Steve,” said Natasha. “I wasn’t leaving him alone with those creeps.”

Tony smiled at that. “Right.” He pointed to Wilson. “Whose side is he on?” 

“Steve’s,” Wilson answered, without hesitation.

“He’s with us,” Natasha agreed. 

“Good,” said Tony. “You go help with the escort. Nat, I need you to go through data with me and Brucey. We’re going to have to figure out what the hell they did to Steve, and where the hell we’ll find data my dad hid seventy years ago.” 

“I can answer that last question,” Sharon said. She seemed somehow uneasy, arms crossed rigidly, glancing away from the rest of them. “At least, I know who can answer it.”

* * *

The last time Tony had seen Peggy Carter had been at his parents’ funeral; she had been an imposing figure even then, near seventy, and Tony had been strung out on pills just to manage to get through the goddamn rigamarole. He vaguely remembered her saying something about his father’s last, heroic act, all prim in a well-tailored black suit and pillbox hat, her hair perfectly coiffed and the color of pewter. 

Now, she was frail, delicate, confined to a bed, though the bed was surrounded by photographs of children, nieces, nephews...there were a few, very recent, photos of Steve: clippings of Steve in his uniform, a photo of Steve, Natasha and Sam at some kind of carnival, Steve with a whack-a-mole mallet in his hand, all three of them dripping wet and laughing. 

He looked happy, Tony thought. In spite of everything-- life as a fugitive before his name was cleared, the weeks of scrutiny by the press, the resurgence of HYDRA, whatever that story he had only half pieced together about Steve’s childhood pal being back from the dead and brainwashed and on the run -- the man in that photo looked genuinely happy, at ease with himself in a way that the stiff, uptight soldier he’d met on the helicarrier two years prior would never have been. There was nothing about him that betrayed his history; he looked like any other young man in his late twenties or early thirties-- well, Tony had to admit, not like any other, maybe like any summer blockbuster action movie star. But he looked normal, and maybe a little softer around the edges. 

“He’s a good kid,” Peggy said, and he realized she’d caught him looking at the photo a little too long. 

“Kid?” Tony asked. “Wasn’t he your--” 

Peggy laughed; her laugh was tinkling, musical in a way that belied her age. “That was a very long time ago,” she said. “I know it wasn’t so long for him. I sometimes get the feeling he hasn’t moved on.” 

“Last time I heard from him, he was in the middle of watching Indiana Jones,” Tony said. 

“Oh, I heard about that,” Peggy answered. “He was very confused. He thought they--”

“Were historical,” Tony finished. 

Peggy sighed. “He’s a quick study. He’ll catch up. Now. What about you? Tony? Howard’s boy, aren’t you?” 

“Yeah,” Tony answered. “I-- I’m sorry I haven’t--” 

“Tony, I see Steve more than I see my own children,” she said. “You don’t have to apologize. You grew up. You got busy. And memories can hurt.” 

Tony shrugged, and rubbed his thumbs together, trying not to think about the fact that this woman he hadn’t seen since he was practically a child was coming dangerously close to the truth. “Well, you can thank Steve for this visit, too,” he said, uneasily. “He’s--” 

“Sharon explained everything,” Peggy replied. “There’s no need for delicacy. I suppose they told you about my condition?” 

“Ah--”

“It’s a pain in the arse,” Peggy said, irritably. “Losing chunks of time like that. But we-- we wiped my memory, when I retired. It seemed safest. No one bothers a senile old lady.” 

Tony’s optimism seeped away. “So you don’t remember?” he asked, worrying at his knuckles. 

“I didn’t say that,” Peggy replied. “The code for the kill switch was meant to represent some kind of protein string-- something to do with brain chemistry; it wasn’t my area. After Erskine died, Howard split it up for safety. Howard had a piece, Phillips had a piece. They didn’t trust me with it because-- well. It was Steve, and they knew I would have refused. Whoever did this managed to compile those first two parts, but-- the kill switch was a kill switch, not a naptime switch. It was only intended to be used in its complete form, but they didn’t know about the third part.” 

“A third part, right,” Tony answered. “But who-- who the hell would Howard trust with something like that?” 

“And trust enough to make the right decision, if he had to?” 

Both of their gazes went to the photograph, to the happy young man with the oversized mallet. 

“Shit,” said Tony.

* * *

By the time Tony returned to the Tower, the others had installed themselves, ironically, in rooms that had been intended for them before SHIELD had collapsed. In the aftermath, Steve had said he wasn’t comfortable with the ethical implications of private citizens making decisions about public safety without a mandate from the people, so the new Avengers headquarters had gone unused. And now, here they were. 

Tony eyed the section of his lab that had been curtained off; he could see the corner of a hospital bed, hear the beeping of various sensors, beeping that was clearly confusing DUM-E, who was hovering near the curtain, beeping hopefully every now and then, and more curiously when the responses he received didn’t make any sense. 

“How’s he doing?” he asked Bruce, who was comparing large three-dimensional holographic models of a human brain, which Tony assumed to be Steve’s. 

“I’m obviously no sleep neurologist,” Bruce replied, “but if you look here and here--” and he pointed to a brightly-illuminated area toward the center of the model, “the activity in his posterior cingulate is completely at odds with his thalamus, his sensory-motor areas…” 

“Repeat in English, please?” Barton asked, as he stalked toward the projection. 

“He’s dreaming,” Tony replied. 

“That’s good, right?” 

But Tony lost the thread of the conversation as he stood, cold, staring at the model. He pulled out his phone, pressed a few keys, requested all the old Dreamvision data JARVIS could get his figurative hands on. 

“Tony?” Bruce asked.

Tony wasn’t sure how much time had passed. He shook himself. “I’m fine,” he said. “I’m good. I’m gonna...go check on our patient.” 

He held the plastic shield in his hand as he slipped past the curtains, standing at the foot of the hospital bed. 

Steve was huge; he made the bed look small, and seeing someone so damn healthy hooked up to sensors and an IV drip made Tony feel suddenly very mortal. He absently rubbed at the scar on his sternum, the one where the reactor used to be, the one he’d told the plastic surgeons to leave. 

Steve looked so goddamn young. Like this, out of his uniform, unaware and unselfconscious, there was no commanding presence, just a boy in a hospital bed. Tony stopped trying to search for the soldier, and started trying to search for the young man in Peggy’s photo, the one with the enormous dimples, the goofy, lopsided grin. 

“I didn’t think through the consequences,” Natasha said quietly, and she caught at Tony’s elbow. “I got so smug about the whole thing; I was thinking about me.”

“You’re talking to the king of self-absorption, Nat,” Tony replied. “You know I would have done the same thing in your shoes.” 

“My shoes had four-inch heels,” Natasha replied. “You would have tripped over yourself.” 

Tony snorted. “Still. I hate to say it, but I’d almost rather have his holier-than-thou posturing and lectures about security states or whatever he’s up to this week than have this.” 

“Bruce says he’s dreaming,” said Natasha.

“Yeah, well, brain activity, blah blah blah,” Tony said. 

“What do you think he’s dreaming about?”

Tony looked down at the shield in his hand. He turned it around, then rolled it across his knuckles like a coin. “Life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness? I don’t know. The world he thought he was saving?” 

“Are you going to find out?” 

Tony stopped, and looked back at Natasha, who was staring up at him with big, green, unblinking eyes, in what would have seemed like the most innocent expression in the world if he hadn’t known her so well. 

“What?” he asked. 

“You requested the Dreamvision files,” she said. “From the nineties. Just after your parents died. I know it’s purely theoretical, but…”

“It’s not theoretical,” Tony replied. The hair on the back of his neck was standing on end; he reached up to rub it. 

“I read through your documents,” Natasha said. “I thought you never built it.” 

“I didn’t.” 

When Natasha spoke again, her voice was quiet, and her brow furrowed, as if she were trying to finish a puzzle without having all the pieces. “Who did?” 

Tony tossed the shield, up into the air, where it spun and flipped as it descended, and he caught it, clapping his fingers around it. 

“That’s the problem,” he said. He unclenched his fingers, revealing an upward-facing star.

* * *

"Tony!"

Tony cringed at the sound of Ty's voice: eager, light, more pleasant than Tony cared to admit.

"Let me handle this," Natasha reminded him. She sat by his side, in one of the big, plush chairs in the waiting area outside Ty's Midtown office, in a prim, plum-colored suit, her hair swept up in a twist. 

Tony nodded, as he rose to his feet and let Ty pull him into a hug, not letting his reluctance show. "It's been too long," he said, and a twinge in his chest told him that a small part of him meant it.

"Too long?" asked Ty. "You're the one who stopped returning my calls."

"Yeah, well, flying around in a tin can doesn't leave you with much time for a social life," Tony pointed out, as he pulled away from an embrace that had lasted too long to be comfortable. 

Ty's blue eyes flicked over to Natasha. "And who's your friend?" he asked. Tony watched Ty's expression change to one of bright-eyed delight. It was a calculated thing; Tony was certain that Ty had known who Natasha was the moment he laid eyes on her. The man hadn't become king of the free press through wide-eyed innocence. "Could it be?"

But Tony relished the next moment, the one where Natasha mimicked Ty's expression exactly, where she rose from her seat and gave him a firm, businesslike handshake. "Natasha Romanoff; the pleasure is all mine, Mr. Stone."

Natasha worked wonders, deftly explaining their need for the Dreamvision system without explaining the fact that Captain America's life lay in the balance, or that the man was currently fast asleep in a hospital bed, just that they thought Dreamvision was their best chance of retrieving a piece of information lost to history.

"You know no one's used Dreamvision since..." Ty looked at the calendar on his smartboard, as if the answer was there. 

"Nineteen ninety-two," Tony supplied. "Unless you've--"

Ty shook his head. "There aren't that many people I'd let inside my head," he answered. "I haven't touched it."

"I'm going to want to look at the schematics," Tony said. "I've got some ideas; I want to have my AI monitor the system."

"I'll get them to you," Ty assured him. He turned on the charm as he looked at Natasha: he was all dimples, all teeth, a smile and intent gaze that were too familiar to Tony. "What are you prepared to offer?"

"I suppose that means you're not willing to let us use your tech out of the goodness of your heart," Natasha said smoothly, batting her lashes flirtatiously. "This doesn't fall on Stark's head, and admittedly, our organization is strapped for cash at the moment."

"And defunct. I'm a businessman, Miss Romanoff," Ty replied. "Surely you can do better than that."

Tony swallowed. He'd told Natasha he would front the cash, that he knew how to negotiate with Ty, but she'd rejected all his offers. 

“I can--” he started, but Natasha put a hand to his arm, leaned forward in her chair, conspiratorially. 

“An exclusive. My first and only since the Senate hearing. On whichever one of your networks you choose.” 

Ty sat bat in his seat. Tony sat back in his seat. Natasha kept leaning forward. 

“My people get to write the questions,” Ty said, after a moment. “No softballs.”

“I get to approve them,” Natasha returned. “You get one half-hour. No questions that would incriminate any of my colleagues; no questions about Budapest.” 

Ty glanced at the ceiling. “Three questions about Budapest.” 

Natasha smiled; Tony knew that smile-- it was the one that meant she’d brought up Budapest deliberately to misdirect the negotiation away from whatever it was she really didn’t want to talk about. 

“One question about Budapest. And I get to approve it,” Natasha replied, with a delicate nod.

“And I get to come along.” 

“Pardon?” Natasha asked, blinking. 

“No,” Tony blurted. 

Ty gave Tony the barest of glances before focusing his attention on Natasha again. “I get to come on the mission. It’s my technology; it’s barely tested-- I don’t feel safe letting a group of inexperienced strangers into another person’s mind.” 

“Mr. Stark is neither a stranger nor inexperienced, from what I understand,” Natasha said. “He’s done copious research into the technology; he’s been studying the brainwave patterns, working with the UC Berkeley dream imaging team--”

“He’s also particularly sensitive to the technology,” Ty said, focusing his gaze on Tony, with a sly smile. “Or didn’t he tell you that?” 

“You tried to imprison me in raw subconscious,” Tony snapped, clapping a hand down on his armrest. 

Natasha coughed, and gave Tony a warning look. 

Ty crossed his arms over his chest. “If I remember correctly, you did imprison me in raw subconscious, but I understand. We were kids, Tony. We were playing with something dangerous; we made mistakes.” 

“Trying to have me executed by a Roman Senate made up of your own mental projections was a mistake?” Tony asked. 

“Tony,” Ty said, “I’m really glad you came to me; I’m so glad you trust me to help, but maybe it would be better for everyone if you weren’t part of the team for this, Tony.” 

“I’m afraid that’s out of the realm of possibility,” Natasha replied. “I think,” she said, looking to Tony, “that I can convince Mister Stark of the necessity of allowing you to join the mission _solely_ as an observer, but I promise that if anything goes wrong, I will have you killed by a Roman Senate in real life, even if I have to resurrect them from the dead, which I’m becoming more and more convinced might be possible. Tony’s going, and I’m going.” 

Tony was as surprised by this assertion as Ty appeared to be. 

“You are?” he asked. 

Natasha just gave him a sly look, eyes slightly hooded.

* * *

Bruce was in the lab, bright and early, when Tony walked in, still bleary-eyed. He pressed a cup of coffee into Tony's hands, and Tony slurped at it gratefully. 

"How'd they rope you into this, Brucey?" Tony asked. 

Bruce shrugged. "Apparently, of everyone Natasha knows, I'm the one she trusts the most with heavy-duty narcotics," he answered. "I get to drug you and track your vitals. No accounting for taste, huh?"

"You going to buy me dinner first, at least?" Tony asked.

"On my salary?" Bruce retorted. "We should probably talk about who's gonna buy dinner for whom."

Tony turned his attention to the curtained area, the glimpse of a hospital bed through the cracks. He stepped over, tentative, pulled the curtain back, just an inch. 

Bruce glanced up at him from his desk, where he was setting up the imaging software-- they couldn’t pull truly discernible images, not yet, but recording what they could see would help with the debrief after the fact. 

“You look more scared of going into Steve’s head than you do of flying around in a metal suit redirecting warheads and fighting explosive soldiers,” Bruce observed. 

“Yeah, well, I understand the mechanics behind warheads and the biology behind Extremis,” Tony answered. “Human brains…” Tony held his hands up, helplessly. “People aren’t even my strong suit when I’m talking to them.” 

“Come on,” Bruce said. “It’s not like you’re going into my mind. It’s Steve. I can’t imagine he’d let anything happen to anybody, even in a dream.” 

“He’s been in there for four days,” Tony said. “Five minutes of real time, that’s an hour of dream time even at the most basic level of REM sleep. Everything gets multiplied by twelve. He’s been in there for forty-eight days.” 

Bruce whistled. 

Tony finished his coffee. “And that’s if he’s still right there on the surface, in normal REM sleep.” 

“Do I want to ask what’s not on the surface?” Bruce asked. 

“Gentlemen,” said JARVIS. “I hate to interrupt, but Agent Romanoff is on her way with Mister Stone.” 

“Right, J,” Tony answered. “Send ‘em in.” 

He looked back to Bruce and shook his head, then felt for the shield in his pocket.

“No,” he answered. “No, you don’t.” 

He wiped his hands on his jeans, even though his hands were already clean.

* * *

Ty raised an eyebrow at the altered Dreamvision apparatus, giving an experimental tap to its lid, as if that might tell him something about Tony’s adaptations to the technology via osmosis.

“So, what’s the plan, pals?” he asked.

Tony coughed, pointedly. 

“I’m inducing sleep for two hours,” Bruce answered. “That’ll give them a solid day in slumberland. It’s a heavy sedative, but one we should be able to pull you out of.” 

He attached monitors to both Tony and Natasha-- a sensor on each temple, chest sensors to measure their breathing, heart rate-- a formality Tony had dispensed with in his twenties, but that Bruce had been adamant about, given Tony’s recovery status, an opinion that had been firmly supported by Pepper. 

He clapped a small diode to Tony’s ear, taping it in place. “And that’ll let you talk to JARVIS. Remember, it’s fully functional in first-level REM sleep, but--”

“I know,” Tony assured him. “If I go down any deeper, it’s variable. I might need to set up another mode of communication. J?” he tried. “All systems go?” 

“Loud and clear, Sir,” said JARVIS. 

“I read through your reports,” Bruce said, as he fitted Tony and Natasha with IV needles. Steve, still sleeping behind the curtain, had already been connected to the apparatus. “What we’ve got to do here is a tiny bit different, on account of Steve, uh, the subject, already being asleep. You two used to take turns creating the dreamscapes; you had control over where you went, what you saw. Well, one of you did. The problem here is, you’re going to have to get inside Steve’s head. We’ve got no way of controlling what he’s dreaming, so, uh...best of luck?”

“Cherry pie and baseball,” Tony joked, but it fell flat. “The Declaration of Independence? Federalist papers?”

Ty, at least, snorted. “Funny, he was always your hero when we were kids,” he said. “Not so impressive in the flesh? I hope you haven’t traded in your shield.” 

Tony patted his pocket. “It never led me wrong,” he answered. 

“We have, like Bruce said, twenty-four hours to complete this mission,” Natasha said. “What we need to do is find a way to get Steve to give us the code we need.” 

“Do I get to ask what this code is for?” Ty asked. “Or why Captain America appears to be unresponsive?” 

“No,” Natasha replied. “You’re here to oversee your technology, that’s all.”

“I’m a newsman,” Ty pointed out. “I have to report the news.” 

“It won’t be news by the time we’re finished,” said Natasha. 

Bruce readied the injections.


	3. Burning City

Tony woke up. He lay flat on his back on something rougher than the chair in his lab. His cheek was touching something damp, slick-- cobblestones.

He sat up, eyes adjusting to wakefulness-- or some simulation of it. They were in an alleyway; the smell of decomposing vegetables tickled his nostrils unpleasantly, rain patterned on his head. 

Wires ran overhead, spiderwebbing the skies in criss-cross patterns. 

Tony pinched himself, already knowing he would feel the sensation, but there it was, the slight pressure of his fingertips on his forearm. 

Tony reached into his pocket, found the little shield, pulled it out. It was smooth and undamaged, brightly painted with a blue center, white star, red stripes. 

"Right," he observed, putting it back, a chill running through him. He shook it off. “Good morning, Dreamvision.” 

"New York," Natasha said, turning in a circle, taking in their scenery. .

Tony stood and turned to face them. "Well, technically, yeah, Nat, but--"

There was a childish scream, coming from somewhere close. Instinctively, Tony burst into action, sprinting toward the street.

Natasha followed. "New York," she repeated. "Brooklyn. Right around present-day DUMBO."

She pointed to the shadow of the bridge. 

"JARVIS," Tony said, "I'm going to need a--"

"I think it would be ill-advised to deploy any armor in this scenario, Sir," JARVIS said in Tony's ear.

Three young boys, dressed in pants that honest-to-goodness came to their knees with honest-to-goodness suspenders flew by, the smallest of them dripping blood from his nose, holding something tightly under one arm. He wasn't as swift or coordinated as the other children, and his pursuers soon caught up to him, shoving him face-first into the cobbles.

He let out a cry, as one of the boys-- the largest of the three, pinned him to the ground with his foot, his bundle flying-- or flopping, Tony thought-- to the ground: an ordinary pigeon, hopping about crookedly, one wing severely broken. Tony winced, just looking at it. 

The third boy, a tall, skinny boy with red hair, dove for the injured bird, cackling. 

“LET IT GO!” screamed the smallest child, blond hair, damp from sweat, falling into his face. He kicked upward, trying to hit the bigger boy who pinned him, but his blows glanced off, harmless. He wheezed, and coughed, and spat a mouthful of blood onto the sidewalk. 

The red-haired boy holding the pigeon snickered, and showed a toothless grin. “Let it go, let it go,” he echoed, mockingly. He reached his fingers around the pigeon’s neck. “What’re you gonna do now, little--” 

Tony and Natasha exchanged the barest of glances. In the next moment, Tony had lifted the bigger boy from off the smaller one’s back, holding him up in the air where he screeched.

Natasha slipped an arm around the neck of the boy who held the pigeon captive, using the same chokehold he used on the bird-- more gently, of course, but similar enough to make her point clear.

“LEMME GO!” the boy with the pigeon yelled, in a parody of his own mocking words, as the littlest boy pushed himself to his feet, his knees skinned, his lip split, his knuckles bruised. 

His clear blue eyes were wide and pleading. “Don’t hurt them,” he said. 

Tony dropped his captive. “Go home,” he said. “Don’t cause any more trouble.” 

The boy backed away, looking awestruck, and then turned on his heel and ran. 

Natasha’s captive whimpered. Tony nodded to the little blond boy, who wiped his bloody nose on the back of his hand. 

“Go get your bird,” Tony said. 

The little boy walked up to the other boy, shoulders straight, unflinching, and held his hands out. “Let it go,” he repeated, eyes flashing with defiance. 

The bully dropped the bird into the younger child’s outstretched hands. The bird squawked with pain, and flopped pathetically. 

Natasha let her captive go, and the second boy, much like the first, turned and ran. She dusted her hands off, shrugged at Tony. 

The little boy stroked the pigeon’s head, and cooed softly at it. 

“Come here,” Tony said. 

“He’s hurt,” said the boy. “I don’t think he’ll fly again.” 

“As a matter of fact,” Tony answered. “I know he will.” 

“Are you a veterinarian?” the boy asked, his eyebrows quirking up, skeptical. 

“I’m better,” said Tony. He held his hand out for the bird. “I build wings.” 

He marched the injured animal back into the alley, where he found an orange crate and a piece of heavy brown paper, and he sat down on the cobbles, tailor style, with the bird in his lap, as the little boy looked on in awe. 

He managed to fashion a reasonably decent splint, set the wing, and then let the bird loose. It hopped onto the cobbles, and Tony imagined it looked quite pleased with itself. 

But the boy was tipping his head, curiously. “Do I know you?” he asked.

Tony smiled. “No,” he answered. “But you will. Steve, aren’t you? Joe Rogers’ boy?” 

“You knew my dad?” the child asked, bright-eyed but hesitant. “You--”

Somehow, Tony couldn’t bring himself to lie, not even to a child he _knew_ was made of dream-stuff. “He’d be proud of you, kid,” he said. “You need somebody to walk you home?”

“I can manage,” Steve said, bony little fingers in fists, chin jutting out bravely. 

“Sure you can,” Tony said. He stood up, and barely suppressed the urge to ruffle the boy’s hair-- barely, but he did. “You run into any more bullies, give me a yell, okay?” 

Steve’s head bobbed obediently, and he took off running again, all awkward, knobby limbs. The pigeon waddled along after. 

“I’m going to have to tell Sam that he’s not Steve’s only wingman,” Natasha said, her tone so dry that Tony wasn’t sure what sort of joke it was supposed to be.

“We shouldn't have let him go,” Natasha said, as she sidled up to Tony. "He's Steve's subconscious. He has the Intel, even if he doesn't know it."

“You can’t interrogate a kid,” Tony snapped, sounding more irritable than he intended. 

"Hey," Natasha said, calmly. "Hey, there are ways to get information that aren't interrogation. Give me a little credit, Stark. We shouldn't have let him go. You think we can find him again?"

“Yeah," Tony replied. “That’s what I’ve got J for. J, where’d Little Stevie run off to?” 

“Across the bridge, Sir,” JARVIS answered. “He’s on his way to Stark Tower.” 

“Did I mishear that, J? We’re in, like, the nineteen-thirties. Sounded like you said Stark Tower.” 

“Apparently, Sir,” JARVIS answered. “In Captain Rogers’ subconscious, there is a Stark Tower.”

* * *

The city shifted around them, as if it were liquid and not concrete, storefronts of a bygone age inhabiting new, shiny edifices standing side by side with crumbling old buildings housing Shake Shack, Lenny's, Starbucks, Chipotle.

"Oh, hell, it's Rickshaw," Tony observed, mouth watering at the appearance of the familiar red truck emblazoned with Soviet-style posters of dumplings and the slogan 'Who's Your Edamame?' "I haven't had a chocolate soup dumpling in--"

"That's because they're out of business," Natasha pointed out.

Tony stopped and bought a chocolate soup dumpling, the filling as rich and gooey, the sesame coating as crunchy as he remembered it. "I wish I believed in a god to thank for Steve's memory," he said, as he licked chocolate off his fingers. "Thank Erskine?"

"It's all food," Tony observed, as they wandered past an old-style Kosher butcher, sandwiched between a burger joint and a vegan creperie with signs in hand-painted curlicues advertising their gluten-and-dairy-and-soy-and-nut-free options. "My childhood idol sure seems to think with his stomach."

"He grew up in poverty and now has a metabolism four times faster than the average human's," Natasha supplied. "It fits the profile." 

But they wandered on, crossing a bridge on foot that seemed, at once, to be a conglomeration of the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges, but that stretched on far longer than either did in reality, housing tiny, crowded stalls of antiques and curiosities, as if the Ponte Vecchio were sandwiched between two New York landmarks. 

He thought he caught himself, standing at a jewelry stall, haggling cheerfully with a merchant, hand in hand with Pepper, and he winced and kept going.

Natasha picked up her pace, suddenly-- not so much that Tony might have noticed if he didn't know her quite so well, but with purpose, keeping her gaze directly ahead. He quickened his pace to catch up.

"You okay, Nat?"

"Fine," she said. "But there was someone--"

"You recognized?" Tony asked. 

"Is that normal?" she asked.

"Do I want to know why you were hanging out in Florence?" 

"Well, it wasn't to buy jewelry," Natasha answered.

"Oh, you saw that?" Tony put an arm around her shoulder. "It's Steve's dream, not yours. They should go away. Just try not to attract attention."

They found themselves further north than they should have been, the bridge sweeping out into Manhattan with a stately lamp-post marking its exit, enormous and bronze, oxidized to teal-green, with five glass globes that glowed now, even in daylight, with a light that didn’t seem earthly. 

Rain began to fall. 

"Fifty-Ninth Street," Tony observed, though they found themselves facing a block of burned-out buildings, fires still smoldering in the rubble. 

And there, in front of them, several blocks uptown from its usual location, the black, modern facade of Stark Tower rose from the smoke, solid and undamaged.

“What do we do now?” Natasha asked. 

“Look for Steve,” Tony asked. “And any-- places he’d hide secrets. Safes, lockboxes, anything that can be open and shut. Think of it like a video game.” 

A lone figure, a slight, uniformed soldier, made his way cautiously toward a dark doorway.

Tony almost didn't recognize him, not like that, not undersized and swimming in his uniform, but there was still something about how he walked, his shoulders straight, his head held high, something commanding in his presence even when it was diminished. 

“Nat?” Tony asked, turning to her. “You want to take this? He trusts you.” 

“You first,” Natasha replied, in an airy tone, as if she wanted Tony to think she cared less than she did. “If he won’t give it to you, I’ll try.” 

Tony nodded, and made his way after the soldier. 

The bar was dim, dingy, dark. Tables and bottles had been overturned, a beam had crashed to the floor. 

Steve was folded over a table, head hidden against his arms, his body wracked with sobbing. He looked so small, so vulnerable, and Tony took a step back, suddenly taken with the realization that this was a memory from the war: this was a memory from after Steve had taken the serum, after he had transformed into the idealized action hero Tony had grown up idolizing, that by all accounts, the man should be six-foot-two with a chest like a barrel and arms like cannons, but here, here in this moment, in this dream, he was small, and weak, and unchanged. 

Tony wondered how often Steve still saw himself this way. 

His foot hit the floor, skidded on a bit of broken glass, and Steve looked up, squinting at him. 

There was a long silence. 

“Sorry,” Tony said. “I--didn’t mean to interrupt.” He swallowed, more affected by the dusty-sticky tear tracks on Steve’s face than he would have cared to admit. There had been a night, one night, at dinner, when he’d seen his mother cry like that, just before his parents had sent him off to boarding school, and never again. 

He glanced away, trying to look nonchalant. 

“Tony?” Steve asked. His voice, in this smaller body, wasn’t so deep, but it still had the tell-tale earnestness, the Brooklyn accent that seemed more and more rare these days, save for cabbies and cops on television shows. 

Steve looked him over, questioningly, as if he were unexpected. “Pull up a chair,” he said, rubbing the back of his sleeve over his face. “There’s brandy, and hell if it does me any good.”

Tony obliged, pouring a measure of whiskey into a glass that was only slightly chipped. “You okay, buddy?” 

“We’re buddies now?” Steve asked, dryly. 

“Yeah, I figure you didn’t leave me for dead in a wormhole, I built reactor-powered death ships for your arch-enemies, that makes us pals, right?” Tony knocked back the brandy, rather pleased with the realization that dream brandy wouldn’t give him a hangover. 

Steve snorted. “For someone who puts up such a good front, you trust the wrong people too often.” 

“I don’t trust anybody,” Tony answered. “Everyone knows that.” 

“Reactor-powered death ships?” Steve asked. “You built reactor-powered death ships for an organization that had already tried to use an alien power source to build weapons based on designs from a Nazi madman.” 

“Fair point.” Tony refilled his brandy. “You saying I should trust someone else, Cap?” 

It felt strange, calling Steve ‘Cap,’ when the only things about him that still reminded Tony of Captain America were his sarcasm and his conviction.

“Yeah,” Steve said. “Me.” 

Tony froze, with his glass halfway between the table and his mouth. He’d wanted to hear it; he’d known even as he’d asked the question that he wanted to hear it, he’d planned on trying to get Steve to say it, it was a logical step in convincing Steve to back his plans for a private Initiative, but he hadn’t realized quite how much he’d wanted to hear it. That his response felt more personal than practical

“Why should I?” Tony asked, trying to keep his voice grave, trying not to let his eyes seem so eager. 

Steve looked down, traced something on the tabletop with scrawny, knobby finger. Tony noticed that his knuckles were red, his nails were chewed. “Because we want the same things,” he answered. “Even if we take different paths to get there.” 

Tony raised an eyebrow, keeping his cool on the outside, at least, even as he was flustered by Steve’s replies. They were true-- of course they were true, and by the end of their time battling the Chitauri, Tony had believed that fervently, but hearing them acknowledged aloud was another thing entirely. 

“Yeah? I didn’t know you were in the market for a bed full of Brazilian beauty queens,” Tony teased. “But I can set you up; it’ll only take a phone call.” 

“Be _serious_ , Tony,” Steve said, rolling his eyes. 

That was better. “Okay,” Tony replied. “Keep with the eye rolling; we’re back in familiar territory. What happened to blah, blah, blah, the dangers of a privatized superhuman police force, freedom, liberty, and justice for all?”

“I still believe that,” Steve answered firmly. “There’s a real threat of oligarchy in a small group of extraordinary people making decisions without regard to the wishes of the people they’re meant to protect. Even if they only mean the best.”

“Oligarchy? That’s not even a word,” Tony said. 

“Yes, it is; it m--”

“I know what it means; I mean, who the hell says oligarchy, anymore?” 

“People who don’t want to live under one,” said Steve, irritably, drumming his fingers on the table. “Are you just going to joke about every damn thing I say?” 

Tony stroked his beard, and finally shrugged. “I just don’t get how you can disapprove of everything I do and then say we’ve got to work together for a common goal.” 

“Because we _have to, Tony_ ,” Steve replied. “I know we both care. If we’re at odds, we’re only going to damage what we both want to build. The only way through this is together.” There was a note of desperation in his voice, he worried nervously at his thumbs.

Tony raised an eyebrow. “You start talking about this like you need me on your team, it’s like I’m a little kid again, daydreaming about kicking Nazi butt.”

“I’m nobody’s role model,” Steve said, soberly, crossing his arms over his chest.

Tony coughed. “Are you _joking_?”

Steve shook his head, the picture earnestness. “Sure, I mean, the uniform’s great; it lets me summon up some real gravitas when I need it, but I’ve made too many mistakes. I do want you on my team. For what it’s worth.” 

“So you’re saying you’re ready to trust me?” Tony asked. He started running scenarios in his head, playing through the scripts of what to say, how to explain to Steve what had happened, why they needed a code that could kill him. “Because that’s a two-way street.” 

_We’re gonna have to have this talk again when we’re awake,_ , he wanted to say, but he was ninety-one percent sure Steve had no clue he was dreaming. 

“Yeah,” Steve said, slowly and cautiously. “Yeah, I suppose I--” 

There was a loud blast, like an explosion, and a flash of light outside the door.

Steve leapt to his feet, up like a shot. For a moment, Tony wondered how he still moved like that, when he was so slight and seemed like a strong gust of wind might knock him down , but then, he supposed, it was Steve's dream. 

"JARVIS, can you see what's happening?" Tony asked, as he, too, hastened toward to door. 

"There's been a spike in Agent Romanoff's brain activity," JARVIS said. "It appears--"

"Natasha?!" Steve cried. "Nat--"

There was a teeming mass of human corpses in the street, all bruised, bloodied, hideously disfigured. The air stank of burning flesh. 

And Natasha was in the center, the corpses seething around her, clawing at her, biting, grabbing as she tried to fight them off. 

The most terrifying thing, to Tony, was that she wasn't screaming, wasn't making a sound. She just methodically fought back against impossible odds. Even as skilled as she was, there were what seemed like hundreds of them, and they seemed to keep coming.

Steve rushed into the writhing crowd, barehanded, punched the first of the corpses he met in the face. As tiny as Steve was, it still had an effect, the corpse's head ripped from its body by the force of Steve’s blow. 

"JARVIS, I need the suit," Tony said. He could feel his pulse rate rising in his chest, the arc reactor humming--

He groaned and looked down at the glowing disk peeking through the fabric of his shirt. 

"Sir," said JARVIS,"I might remind you that you do not need to call the suit to wear it while you are traveling in the subconscious. However, I predict a ninety-six percent likelihood that Captain Rogers' projections will make you a target if you--"

"I just need to get to Nat," Tony said. "I need to--"

He decided on a compromise, raised a hand and willed a single gauntlet to appear, blasting a repulsor beam at the nearest corpse. 

Natasha followed his lead, now armed with an automatic rifle, and began shooting corpses directly in the head. 

Steve was still small, and kept on punching away with his bare fists.

Between the three of them, they were successfully thinning out the corpses.

"Nat, are you--" Tony started.

But Natasha was silent, staring over Tony’s shoulder, panting. “Get down,” she whispered; her eyes wide and wild. 

Tony obeyed instantly, dropping to one knee just as something whizzed over his head. He pivoted toward the source. 

There, stepping over the piles of corpses with abandon, was a man Tony had only seen in photographs. His icy blue eyes were fixed on Natasha.

Steve was standing stock-still, hands at his sides, mouth slightly agape as he watched the man approach. “Bucky?” he asked. 

But it was as if-- Tony couldn’t decide what to call him in his head; Bucky seemed so _childish_ , so personal, but calling a man who was Steve’s friend, for god’s sake, by a title like ‘The Winter Soldier’ sounded almost too distant. So, Bucky. He’d try Bucky. Bucky wasn’t paying attention to Steve at all, didn’t seem to notice that Steve was there, didn’t notice Tony, either, except for a single sharp glare. He walked, purposefully, toward Natasha, who seemed paralyzed, feet cemented in place, hands trembling at her sides.

Tony got back to his feet, shielding Natasha with his own body. He raised a hand, fired off another repulsor blast at-- oh, hell, at _The Winter Soldier_ , he was trying to kill them, or something, he didn’t get cutesy nicknames. 

Steve shouted and sprinted forward. “Tony, don’t!” he yelled, but he needn’t have-- the beam glanced off the Winter Soldier’s metal arm with all the force of a spitball. He reached for Tony’s shirt-- how had he gotten so close, and lifted him into the air, dashing him against the ground so that the entire left side of Tony’s body lit up with pain. 

He struggled to right himself, but the Winter Soldier was on Natasha, had her by the throat, brought the sharp blade of his knife to her cheek and began to cut, slowly, into the skin. 

Steve, too, seemed frozen in place, shaking his head, as if he couldn’t believe what he saw. “Put her down,” he said, finally, firmly moving for the other man. “Don’t make me--” 

Blood was dripping down Natasha’s face; the Winter Soldier flipped his knife, then pointed it at Natasha’s eye socket. 

She let out a wild, guttural, choking sound.

“JARVIS,” Tony whispered. “JARVIS, take us out. Now.”

* * *

Tony woke up.

He was sitting in a chair, and Natasha was vomiting into her bare, cupped hands. 

“Nat?” Tony asked. “Nat, are you--” 

Bruce rushed over with a bowl and a towel, and then turned on the faucet, running the water to cold while Natasha finished puking and wiped her hands and mouth. 

“Do I even want to know what brought that on?” Ty asked archly, watching with an inscrutable expression, seated on Tony's workbench, leaning back on his hands.

"Get out, Ty," Tony snapped.

Ty lifted both hands in the air, chuckling even with the defensive posture. "Observer, remember?" 

"This isn't part of the mission." 

"Natasha?" Bruce asked her, as Natasha held her cup of water in two, trembling hands. 

"I'm fine," she said. 

"One of Cap's projections attacked her," Tony said. "Ty. Out."

"Projections?" Bruce asked. 

"Parts of Captain Rogers’ subconscious," Ty replied. "They identify the conscious, invasive sleepers as a threat and attack them in order to expel them from the dream."

"Thanks for being oh-so-very helpful," Tony said, rubbing his head. "You're still not wanted."

Natasha was shaking her head. "But that wasn't--" she said. "That couldn't have been Steve's projection. That was mine."

"What?" Tony asked.

"That was my memory," Natasha said. "It-- Steve couldn't have known--"

Tony swallowed. "Nat?" he asked. "Nat, are you-- what did he do to you?"

Natasha shook her head. "It's not what he did to me. It's what I did to him. Steve doesn't-- you can't tell Steve. He doesn’t know the whole story--"

Ty cleared his throat. "I'm obviously the odd man out here," he announced, hopping off the workbench and heading for the door. Then, more seriously, he shot Tony a meaningful look. "T, you want to come outside for a second?"

* * *

Tony ran both of his hands through his hair, taking a deep breath as the door slid shut behind him. 

"What is it?" he asked, raising an eyebrow at Ty.

"For one," Ty said, shaking his head. "You have got to drop the edge, Tony. It's all water under the bridge for me; sometimes you have to let things go."

Tony bristled. "Sure, attempted murder, let it go; are you watching Disney movies these days or something? How old are you?"

“Attempted _murder_?” Ty asked, in an incredulous tone. “I never--”

“Virtual murder,” Tony snapped. “You tried to lock me up in a dream.” 

“You were grieving,” Ty said. “I didn't know how to handle it. I-- was acting on some misguided belief that I could protect you if I kept you-- I mean, if we--"

He stopped talking, looked down. "I was a kid. It was a mistake. You of all people should understand that."

"I've heard your apologies before, Ty," Tony said, stiffly.

Ty gave him a dry look. "I'm not apologizing. You know she can't go back in there. Tell them I'm going with you."

"What?" Tony barked out a laugh. "You can't be serious."

"If your friend in there has some unfinished business with somebody-- and based on the news that comes across my desk, I can guess exactly who that somebody is-- " Ty pointed out, "no matter how vaguely you and your friends talk about it-- she isn't going to be able to complete the mission. It's not worth the risk. I saw how hard your doctor friend knocked you out. Having the AI set up to orchestrate your kicks out is brilliant, but if that doesn't work--"

Ty crossed his arms over his chest. "One of you is going to end up in limbo. And speaking from personal experience, it's not worth it."

"Do you think for a minute I believe you give a fuck about me, Ty?" Tony asked.

"You don't need to believe anything about my sympathies," Ty replied. "You know I'm right."

"I can ask Barton," Tony said. "Wilson. There are plenty of others."

"Sure you could," Ty agreed. "But I'm the only person here who can guarantee you I have absolutely no memories in common with your Captain. The only thing I share with him--"

He smirked, tilting his head as he looked Tony over, head to toe, long, slow, lingering the same intense way Ty used to look at Tony when they were younger.

"--is you."

* * *

"Are you sure about this?" Natasha asked, when Tony explained the new plan. "I'm fine now."

She ran her fingers through her hair. "Now that I know what to expect, I can handle it."

"It's not that simple," Tony replied. “If he’d killed you--”

“I would have woken up,” Natasha said. “Bruce could have put me back under.”

“You know what limbo is?” Ty asked. 

“You mean like the party game?” Bruce peered at Ty over the rims of his glasses. “I tried it once; I fell on my ass. Or are we talking pagan babies?” 

“Pagan babies,” Ty replied. “Stuck in nothingness for all eternity.”

“It always sounded pretty calming to me,” admitted Bruce. 

Tony tapped on an image on Bruce’s screen, bringing up an EEG graph. 

“Delta waves?” Bruce asked. frowning at the deep valleys and high peaks. “That’s not REM sleep.” 

“Nope,” Tony replied. “But it’s mine. My graph, from the last time I hooked up to the machine.”

“It would be deep, deep subconscious, wouldn’t it?” asked Bruce. 

“Yeah,” Tony answered. “It’s...look, Brucey. Ty and I were fucking around. It was just after my folks died. We were kids; we did some things we shouldn’t, but…” 

“But what? I don’t follow.” 

“You get...seduced by it; it gets hard to tell what’s real.” Tony said, glancing back toward the curtains. “You’re so far down that two minutes? That’s two multiplied by twelve to the power of four. It’s a month. It’s fucking hard to wake up from that.”


	4. Wolves

Tony found himself in a dark wood, moonlight filtering down through nearly-bare trees, the ground beneath his feet littered with dry leaves that crunched with every footstep.

"Ty?” 

“Behind you.” 

Tony turned and found Ty looking up at the night sky overhead.

“Where do you think we are?” Ty asked. 

“Beats me,” Tony said. “The guy was from Brooklyn; he probably didn’t _see_ a forest before the war.” 

He scratched his head. “So...Europe, maybe?” he asked, taking a step backward, his foot striking a path.

“Huh,” Tony said, looking down. 

“You think it’s worth following? asked Ty.

“It’s Steve’s mind,” Tony said. “It’s where he wants us to go.” 

Tony kicked away some of the leaves, to discern the path’s direction, and started off. 

“Really?” There was a scoffing note to Ty’s voice. “You of all people know that’s not always true.” 

“It’s true with Steve,” Tony said, and he was surprised by the defiance in his voice. “He doesn’t mislead people. Not without very good reason.”

“We all think we have very good reason,” Ty pointed out. 

“Okay, fine,” Tony replied, irritated. “We’re all assholes. He’s a sanctimonious fuckhead who doesn’t listen, picks fights on sheer principle, and judges people before he gets to know them. He pretty much crushed all my childhood fantasies in five minutes. But, you know, you grow up, you outgrow your heroes. And the next step is realizing they’re human beings, like everybody else. So, sure, maybe Steve would fuck around with us. But he’d only fuck around with us because he genuinely believed it was in our best interest.” 

Ty shrugged. “There was a time when you would have said that about me,” he said, mildly. 

“There was also a time when I thought a white Russian was a classy beverage,” Tony replied. “We live and learn. Anyway, I’ve got years on him, now. Sometimes I wonder if I should return the favor and try to be some kind of role model, but, seriously, who wants to look up to--”

The path opened up onto a paved road, the lights of a small, sleepy town a little ways in the distance. A few cars drove lazily by, not seeming in much of a rush to get anywhere. 

The full moon was high overhead. 

A gilt-painted sign, made of wood,with scrollwork at the edges, the nice kind you see in nice, small towns away from the bustle of the big city, stood a few yards ahead of them.

“Starkesboro?” Ty asked, cocking his head to one side. “Captain America’s subconscious has _towns_ named after you?”

“Fuck,” said Tony. “We need to get out of here.” 

A wolf howled in the distance. 

“What--” Ty rushed to keep up with Tony, who was walking away from the town as fast as he could walk without breaking into a jog, along the shoulder of the road. 

“I gave Steve these comics to read!” Tony said. “He asked, you know, he called me up and said, uh, Stark, I heard you had a bunch of the comics they published while I was in the ice. He was curious! He wanted to borrow them! I...I thought it would be funny. I gave him the _worst_ ones I could think of. I gave him some of the good ones, too, but I couldn’t pass up the chance…” 

Tony rubbed at his face. “I can’t believe he actually _read_ them.” 

“Read what?” 

Before Tony could answer the question, Ty was tackled to the ground by a blur of red, white, blue...and brown fur. 

“God _dammit_ , Steve!” Tony growled.

The werewolf that was currently pinning a shocked Ty to the ground growled back, glaring at Tony with fierce, feral eyes. 

Wisely or not, Ty took the opportunity to sock the werewolf in the jaw. The wolf snarled, gnashing its teeth, and clawed at Ty’s shirt. 

“Somebody in the nineties--” Tony explained, as he called his repulsor back up, “thought it would be fucking hilarious to turn Cap into a werewolf for three issues. No, wait, what am I doing?” he asked. “J, do you have the version of the Berkeley software I’ve be tinkering with? I want to take a pho--”

“TONY, YOUR CHILDHOOD CRUSH IS TRYING TO KILL ME!” Ty shouted, as he elbowed the wolf, with little result. “If he bites me--”

“Photograph saved to drive, Sir,” said JARVIS. 

“He’s not that kind of werewolf,”Tony replied. “He was given some kind of wolf-serum, he doesn’t do the bitey-thing so much as the werewolf-union-organizing thing. C’mon, Steve,” Tony said. 

The wolf stopped pawing at Ty, and sat back on his haunches, cocking his head curiously at Tony.

“Snap out of it; you’re supposed to at least pick up human speech pretty quick. What do-- Ah!” 

Tony slid the shield out of his pocket, smiling to himself as he noted that its fresh coat of paint was back. He flipped it at the Steve-wolf. 

The wolf squinted at the shield, looking confused for a moment, before he caught in his teeth, trotted up to Tony, held it out. 

“I thought you weren’t keen on anybody touching that thing, T,” Ty said flatly. 

Tony shrugged. “It’s Steve. And he’s an overgrown dog.” He didn’t mention that the coat of paint now made it immediately discernible from its waking-world counterpart.

By the time the wolf had crossed the distance to Tony, he has transformed from a ragged half-human monster over six feet tall into a proper, wolf-sized wolf with a sleek coat and four slender legs.

“Great,” Tony said, taking the shield back. 

“Shiny thing?” the Steve-wolf asked. His voice was low, growly, but unmistakably Steve. 

Tony grinned. “Yeah,” he said. “Shiny thing.” 

“Tony?” the Steve-wolf asked. “Shiny thing.” 

“Yeah, yeah, that was always my favorite part,” Tony replied. “That you were totally capable of communicating high-concept ideas like ‘democracy’ to a bunch of lupines, but apparently couldn’t remember the word for ‘shield.’”

The wolf looked happily up at him. “Shiny thing.” 

Tony looked from the wolf, to the shield, then back to the wolf. “Oh, fuck, you want to play fetch, don’t you?” 

Steve wagged his tail. 

“This is _nothing_ like the comic,” Tony muttered. He groaned, rolled his eyes, and pulled at the shield until it expanded to the size of a Frisbee. “You’re entirely too domesticated.” 

He tossed the shield, putting a decent spin on it. Steve-the-wolf bounded after it.

Ty was up on his feet, dusting himself off. “We don’t have time for this,” he said. 

“Well, look,” Tony replied. “Whatever the fuck form he takes, we need him to trust us.”

“How, precisely,” Ty asked, as Steve trotted up to Tony with the plastic shield in his mouth, “do you propose to extract the information from a dog in a costume?” 

Tony took the shield back, wiped the slobber on his jeans, and tossed it again. “Well,” he said. “In the comics, Steve has to battle Starwolf--”

“Starwolf?” 

“He’s a magical wolf made of stars.” 

Ty simply gave Tony the most incredulous look Tony had ever seen. Tony decided to take this as permission to continue. 

“So, defeat Starwolf, get the antidote from Dr. Nightshade, and voila,” Tony finished, as Steve brought the shield back again. “Assuming his dream even works like the comics.” 

“You’re really going to waste all that time?” Ty asked. 

“You have a better idea?” 

“Go one level down,” Ty replied. “Take him with you. I stay here, look after things while you get your code.” 

Tony was highly dubious of any scenario that gave Ty even minute control over his unconscious body. 

Ty smirked, and Tony knew that his suspicion must be written all over his face. 

What he didn't expect was for Steve to drop the shield on the ground, ears pricking up, and let out a low, wary growl.

"Really?" Ty asked. "For fuck's sake, Tony; I'm not a child. Have I done anything to make you think your trust is misplaced?"

Tony gave him a dark look.

" _Lately_?" Ty asked.

The wolf whined. 

The convenient thing about dreamstuff is that it can be manipulated to one's liking in an infinite number of configurations, if one realizes one is dreaming and also has no compelling reason to concern oneself with realism. Ty walked to the nearest broad-trunked tree and opened a door. 

Inside the tree, a light came on, and he removed a dog biscuit, a cupcake, and a Dreamvision apparatus.

Steve wagged his tail.

Tony took a deep breath. "JARVIS," he said, trepidation creeping through him as he formed the words. "Calculate the correct dosage of somnacin for a hundred-and-eighty pound man and a hundred-ten pound wolf. We're going to have to hold those numbers in our brains."

JARVIS delivered the numbers to Tony's phone, and Tony handed it over to Ty, who looked mildly amused at the exchange.

"Retrofitting the system to interface with your AI is brilliant," he said. "The biggest glitch in the Dreamvision system has always been the inability to communicate with the outside world."

"Yeah, well," Tony replied, "let's just hope it's really working, and we're not just dreaming it's working. You've got those dosed?" 

Ty handed him the cupcake, frosted in pink, with the words "Eat Me," spelled on the top in currants. "Welcome back to Wonderland," he said wryly.

Tony could already feel himself drowsing as he finished the cupcake. He held a hand out to Ty, giving Steve a worried look. The wolf was sitting, tail thumping, looking up interestedly at both men. 

"Let me do this," Tony said, and Ty gave him the biscuit.

"Ready, Cap?" Tony asked the wolf, who nearly tackled him at the sight of the biscuit. 

Defending himself from the huge animal, who had managed to fit half of Tony's hand in his maw as he tried to take the treat, tail still wagging furiously, Tony laughed and stumbled back onto the ground. The wolf pounced playfully on him, licking his face and thoroughly covering him in wolf slobber. 

The feeling of paws pressed into his shoulders was the last thing he remembered as he drifted off.


	5. Midnight City

"What are you working on?" Steve asked from the door. He leaned easily against the doorframe, a Meerschaum pipe in his mouth, deep purple silk pajamas draped over his body in a way that traced the muscles of his chest.

“Tony?” Steve asked, tilting his head to one side as he blew a perfect ring of smoke. 

Tony realized he was staring. He coughed, and looked down at his workbench. “Er…” 

Blueprints. Piles and piles of blueprints; hand-drawn, beautiful, artistic things, not like his own computer-generated images. Cars, airplanes, motorcycles... There was a design for a motor, schematics, a sketch, pencilled in so carefully that the surface of it gleamed like silver. But Tony immediately saw three issues with the functional integrity of the design. 

“Steve,” he murmured. He’d known Steve was an artist, but this...every single one of these sketches had come from Steve’s imagination, not his own. 

Tony’s mind spun in circles; he pulled a pencil from the jar on the table and sketched in the quick fixes. His own drawing seemed so crude, he winced a little as he marked up the lovely illustration. “Here,” he said, and nodded for him to come over. “You see this?” 

Steve’s eyes went bright as he took the sketch from Tony, he snatched the pencil from Tony’s hand easily, as if it were the sort of thing he did every day. He sucked on the end of the pencil for a moment, and then pressed the paper down to the work bench. 

“You’re absolutely--” He grinned at Tony, an electric grin, a one-point-twenty-one gigawatt grin, the very same grin he’d worn on his face when Tony had woken up on the street outside Grand Central Station and discovered that he _hadn’t_ died, after all.

Tony hadn’t seen that smile since, and now, he had to admit to himself that it made the hair on his neck stand on end for more reasons than the sheer knowledge of survival. 

“--Brilliant,” Steve finished. He smoothed out Tony’s lines, re-rendered the valves until Tony’s contribution looked as elegantly drafted as the rest of the illustration. “Can you build this?” he asked. “You’ve got any of my resources at your disposal.”

“Your--” Tony frowned. 

Steve puffed on his pipe again, and leaned forward, smiling companionably at Tony. “Any of them, Tony,” he assured him.

Tony felt as if he were missing something; there was something all too familiar about this scenario, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on what it was. 

He took the corrected sheet. “Yeah, of course, I’ll get working on it right--” 

There was a buzzing sound; Tony glanced around for the source, but Steve lifted a golden watch from his pocket. “It’s Coulson,” he said, frowning at the watch. “He’ll want to see me. Come on, Tony.” 

Steve looked down at his pajamas. “You’ve done enough work for tonight. Put on the coffee, and change your clothes; we may be needed tonight.” 

Tony followed Steve out of the workroom, up an old, hand-operated elevator, and onto the second floor balcony of a massive, ornate mansion-- palatial, even, grander than the home Tony had grown up in, with marble floors polished to such a high shine that Tony could see his reflection in them. He was dressed in black-- which wasn’t exactly out of the ordinary for him, though the clothing he wore was decidedly unfashionable: wide,straight-legged black slacks and a _turtleneck_ of all things. 

He frowned and ran his hands through his extremely old-fashioned-looking hair. 

Unsure where he was supposed to go, he followed Steve down the hall, when Steve turned back to look at him. “Tony, coffee,” he said. “I’m going to need it.”

“Coffee, right,” Tony agreed, and moved back toward the wide, sweeping staircase at the far end of the balcony. The bannisters were wide, curved, smooth: exactly the kind of bannister he loved to slide down as a child. 

“Later,” he murmured, and gave the bannister a one-handed clap. He calculated how much time he had: twenty-four hours one level up, minus about two hours they’d spent, times twelve: eleven days. He had _plenty_ of time to try the bannister. 

Tony waited until Steve’s footsteps had receded down the hall in the other direction.

“J?” he tried. “J, can you tell me where the kitchen is?”

Silence. 

“Dammit,” Tony muttered. He’d hoped the connection to JARVIS would work no matter how deeply into dreamspace they went. He reached into his pocket, felt for the shield. Its presence and weight, the way it pressed against his thigh, was comforting. 

He found it by process of elimination, after wandering into an enormous great room with a massive, stately fireplace, a moose head and two enormous swords crossed over the mantle.

"Your subconscious is some interior decorator, Steve-o," Toby muttered, eyeing the overstuffed leather chairs, the mahogany pool table, the grand piano standing in the corner.

He entered a dining room next, just as impressive, with a table that could easily seat twenty and a gold-leaf-and-crystal chandelier, gold candlesticks, heavy green velvet curtains. And a small side door that, when pushed, led, as Tony hoped, to the kitchen.

The kitchen was just an enormous, though less oppressive with opulence. A long burger-block table was the centerpiece of a room decorated with bright, clean white tile, and long, black marble counters.

And the most beautiful coffeemaker Tony had seen in his life. There was no possible way, he thought to himself, that it would be functional anywhere but in a dream, all shiny chrome valves and red enamel, but then, Steve didn't even _drink_ coffee in real life, not unless is was frozen and loaded with sugar and caramel syrup with whipped cream and chocolate shavings on top, so what would he know, really? 

Tony flipped a few switches, filled the machine with tap water and a fancy Kona blend he, thankfully, willed into existence on his own, rather than relying on the bags of coffee beans Steve's imagination had supplied (he'd cringed at peppermint-strawberry-toffee-crunch) and pushed buttons until a little light came on, and he heard the water bubbling inside. Satisfied that it was actually brewing something, he found his way back upstairs.

The trouble now was that he had absolutely no idea where he was supposed to change his clothing. 

He turned down the hall where he had left Steve, and started checking doors. 

Each one hid a bedroom grander than the one before, except for one that was full of plush toys, and another that was-- Tony smiled, as he shut the door-- full of pie.

Finally, he opened a door and peered into a rather plain, understated room, only to be met with a curious look from Steve, who turned toward Tony and away from the mirror, where he'd been tying a plum-colored silk tie.

He was wearing slacks of a similar cut to Tony's own, in a deep eggplant color, and a crisp white shirt with dark red-brown leather suspenders. His hair, Tony noticed, was cut the way it had been when Tony had first met him, longer than it was now, falling boyishly in his eyes. 

"Tony?" Steve asked, as he shrugged on an eggplant-colored vest, tucking a plum handkerchief into the pocket.

"Coffee's on," Tony said.

"Coulson's not here yet, is he?" Steve asked. "You're not dressed. Is everything okay?"

"Yeah," Tony answered, and he forced a smile. "I just wanted to check on you."

Steve shrugged on a shoulder holster, armed with an odd-looking purple pistol, and Tony mentally scrambled to recall what it reminded him of, without much luck. Steve pulled a suit jacket on over it, and stepped back toward the mirror, carefully stroking his hair into place with a finger. 

The entire effect was sleek, elegant: The suit was perfectly tailored to fit Steve’s broad shoulders and narrow waist in a way that his own tailors, even the best in the business, could never quite emulate. Tony had never seen a man wear a suit so well, let alone a purple one, and the Steve of this dream carried himself with an easy grace that seemed unfamiliar, as if this man was what Steve could be if he weren’t always on alert, always looking over his shoulder, always missing something. 

Tony was staring again. 

“Check on me?” Steve asked. He tilted his head, his brow furrowing slightly, his jaw skewed.

“I’m not allowed?” 

“No, you--” Steve took a very visible breath, his eyes not quite looking at Tony, not quite focusing on anything. “Come on,” he said, and he clapped a hand to Tony’s shoulder. “You need to get dressed.” 

Steve propelled him down the hall to the next room over, which at least solved that riddle for Tony. His own room, like Steve’s beside it, was relatively spare compared to the elegant, almost baroque decor in the other bedrooms. There was a portrait of his mother on the wall that looked suspiciously like the passport photo that was in her SHIELD file: her hair pinned up, her makeup and clothing conservative, a not-quite-smile on her lips as she looked directly ahead. 

Tony opened the closet, pulled out a clean, black undershirt, a black dress shirt, and a jacket-- there were a dozen of them in there, all identical: trim, black, double-breasted, with a high collar, made from fine-spun wool. 

“Where…” Tony tried to place this jacket. He _knew_ this jacket. He rubbed a thumb against the soft wool, laid it out on the bed, and gave Steve a questioning look, but Steve didn’t seem to realize that the look was because of the _jacket_.

Steve rubbed at his temples as Tony tugged off the turtleneck. 

“I’ve been having dreams,” Steve said. 

Tony looked down at his chest as he lifted his undershirt over his head: it was whole, unscarred, the chest of a younger, fitter man, someone who hadn’t spent half a decade with an electromagnet in his chest cavity or been through multiple surgeries in the past several months. He wondered, for a moment, if this is what he’d look like, now, if none of that had happened. 

“Yeah?” Tony asked. He busied himself with the buttons of his dress shirt, wanting too much to know if Steve’s eyes were on him, but not quite willing to look. “What kind of dreams?” 

And then it struck him that maybe the body he was wearing was what Steve envisioned. 

“I’m a superhero,” Steve said. “Don’t laugh--” 

Tony smoothed out his shirt, tucked it into his pants, and started buttoning up the jacket. “I wasn’t laughing. But you’re--” 

“Not like this,” Steve said. "Like...something from a comic book...super-fast, super-strong. Fighting monsters, and aliens, creatures that can't exist."

He raised a hand, cupping it, as if he were trying to find a way to contain the idea, hold it, look at it from all angles.

"You're in them, too," he said, and he gave Tony a searching look, awaiting some kind of reaction, though Tony didn't know what. "You have a suit of armor. You fly."

Steve frowned. "We live in the future."

“We live in the future, and there are still some things I can’t fix.” He looked away, sadly, for a moment, then waved dismissively, like he was erasing the idea from a chalkboard. "It's silly," he said. "It's a dream."

Tony shrugged. "Sometimes dreams have their own way of telling the truth," he answered. "Anyway," he asked, with an easy grin. "You think I couldn't build a suit of armor?"

That elicited a smile. "You can build anything," Steve said. He glanced away, shook his head. "Maybe, that part, I'll believe."

A buzzer sounded, and Steve leapt into action, making his way down that incredible staircase, heading into the great room. He walked through the room with a sense of purpose, so at home that he didn't seem to notice the magnificent treasures decorating the space: not the suit of armor, not the cracked piece of carved stone that Tony was pretty sure was a piece of the Elgin Marbles. 

Steve walked to the desk, and Tony followed, standing at attention for lack of anything else to do, and he watched as Steve slid a hand beneath the desk’s surface. A light flashed, a buzzer buzzed, and the back of the fireplace rotated away, leaving a smooth, metallic surface.

An elevator door. Tony’s eyes lit up, and he watched eagerly as it opened, impressed by what he assumed was his own handiwork, or at very least what Steve assumed might be Tony’s handiwork.

Phil Coulson walked into the room, dressed like Sam Spade, in a felt fedora and brown trenchcoat, a blue pinstripe suit and red tie beneath it. He was smoking a big, heavenly-smelling Cuban cigar.

“Steve?” said Phil. “Glad to see you, though I’m sorry about the circumstances.” 

“Mayor?” Steve said, stepping forward to shake the man’s hand. “Tony, you can get that coffee, now.” 

It occurred to Tony, as he obediently left the room, that he was some kind of servant or sidekick, though he hadn’t quite sussed out the nature of their relationship: it was clear to him that Steve admired and respected him, and deferred to him in all things mechanical (as any smart man ought to do, Tony thought), but here he was, dressed in a servant’s outfit, being sent to fetch things. 

It also struck him that he didn’t really mind.

He poured two cups of coffee, strong and hot, and then realized he wasn’t sure at all how Steve would take his coffee, since he didn’t take any coffee in the waking world. He fished around in the cabinets, found a silver coffee service that looked older than Steve, and lugged the whole thing back into the great room, on a little wheeled trolley. 

“Just in time; thank you, Tony,” Steve said, as he began loading up his beautiful Kona with an obscene amount of milk and sugar.

Tony bit his tongue and reminded himself to just serve the man chocolate milk next time. 

Phil, on the other hand, seemed to appreciate quality beverages, at least. 

“I’ve been telling your boss,” Phil said, turning to Tony, “that there’ve been some mysterious disappearances down at the dockside. I’d like you to look into them.” 

“Oh?” Tony asked, interestedly. 

“Furious Nicky, the mob boss, went missing,” Phil said, in a dead serious tone.

Tony was incredibly glad he wasn’t drinking coffee, because it would have all been shot out his nose. 

He tried to look very concerned. “And-- you think it’s something we can help with?” 

“There’s a mysterious man seen down there, no one can trace him, no one knows who he is. They say he’s a trained killer, but he’s only got one arm.”

Tony nodded, soberly. God, but Steve had a one-track mind. It was good, though, he thought, maybe something to do with SHIELD, or HYDRA, maybe that would help get Steve into the right frame of mind that Tony could try to get him to remember the code. 

“Well, there’s not a criminal that’s gotten past us yet,” Steve assured Phil, with a nod. “Get your hat, Tony, and fire up Silver Blaze.” 

Tony, mid stride, and wondering where his hat might be, stopped stock still at the name. _SIlver Blaze_. Of _course_. He mentally kicked himself; Silver Blaze was the horse from the Sherlock Holmes story of the same name, but more importantly, the name of the high-tech car from _Midnight Racer_ , the old radio serial Steve loved. He should have recognized the costumes, the radio-watch, the fireplace entry, Steve’s curious love of coffee and tobacco...it was the Midnight Racer all over.

He remembered his way to the workshop. “Yes, boss,” he said, and hurried off. 

_Midnight Racer_. That made Tony the Chauffeur, the Racer’s sidekick, bodyguard, mechanic, and best friend. No _wonder_ Steve had been so surprisingly amiable toward him.

Of course, that meant that all that goodwill and camaraderie were part of the dream, not anything Tony had earned. He should have realized it sooner. 

Tony grabbed the little black chauffeur’s cap from its hook in the workshop, then fumbled around until he found a secret lever that flipped the workshop floor, hiding the extravagant plum-colored convertible parked by the garage door, and revealing a long, slender silver car that was the most artful piece of machinery Tony had ever seen in his life.

He stepped back, taking in the view, almost breathless, then reached for the hood, sliding a hand along the elegant lines of the machine. 

“I built this,” he said, looking around the workshop, at the absolute lack of equipment, puzzling out in his head exactly what he had to work with, how he could have used it to construct the car in front of him. 

And then, as realization struck. “I get to drive this. I--”

Steve chuckled behind him, and he snapped to attention. 

“There are days I feel the same way, Tony,” he said. Steve was wearing dark glasses now, a purple silk scarf concealing his face, a purple Inverness cape that would have looked ridiculous on anyone else. 

Tony turned to face him, not the least because he could feel his ears turning red, and gave him a lopsided smile. 

“You know I couldn’t do this without you,” Steve said, seriously. He reached for something on the workbench, and handed it over to Tony. “Don’t forget your mask.” 

The car handled beautifully; the way she turned on the tight curves of the hillside roads coming out of Steve’s ridiculous mansion felt like an epiphany. Tony was making mental notes even as he drove, trying to suss out what he must have done to make the steering work like that, admiring every detail of the Silver Blaze, from the purring engine to the swiveling, magnifying rearview mirrors. 

The New York of this dream was different from Steve's New York, that patchwork of different eras and memories sewn together by restaurants and landmarks, golden and shimmering and stamped with personal sentiment, every street corner feeling like an entry in a diary. This one was shades of gray, high contrast and low saturation, all sharp angles and dramatic curves and stylized architecture that felt as if someone had built a city by taking cues from a Lynd Ward woodcut. The moon was low and pale in the dark sky, light diffused by the mist, and the spires of the Manhattan skyline rose up, gleaming, and vanished in the fog. 

Tony dimmed the headlights as they drove into an industrial neighborhood, full of dark warehouses and the occasional billowing smokestack. Even a car as perfect as Silver Blaze rattled on the cobblestones. He found a convenient alleyway-- this city seemed to have far more alleys than he recalled encountering in New York-- and parked the car. 

Tony felt like every character in every film noir the human-Jarvis had ever made him sit through. His memory flashed back to lonely Tuesday evenings, when Jarvis was nominally off work, but wound up letting the smallest Stark stay in his apartment for fear the child wouldn’t be fed, and let Tony read on the sofa while he watched old movies. Some of them hadn’t been half bad, though they had been well above Tony’s head at the time. Now, he stood in the shadows, his costume nearly blending in with the night. There was a thrill to this, Tony thought, an adrenaline rush that made the hair on the back of his neck stand on end, different from the feeling of wearing the suit. 

Steve walked a few paces in front of him, clinging close to the walls, and every movement he made was deft, elegant; he was like a tightrope walker on the street. The breeze rifled through, his coat swaying with the wind. 

They moved swiftly toward the waterfront, the fog heavy between the warehouses, so that the end of the road was shrouded in mist. The tall warehouses looming above them, the loading docks, the cobbles running down toward the piers, all called to mind the old Bush Terminal in Sunset Park, though it wasn’t an exact replica. 

They reached a high, chain-link fence topped with barbed wire, the gate shut and padlocked for the night. A dog barked from somewhere past the fence. 

Steve reached in his coat, removing a small, mechanical apparatus that he shoved into the padlock. A moment later, the lock clicked and opened, and Steve pushed the gate open. Tony wanted to ask Steve how he knew where to go, but he knew it was all a dream, that they were going where Steve’s subconscious took them. He tried to remind himself of everything he’d learned about dreaming: that people keep their own secrets in locked places. 

They crept into the shipyard beyond; the hulking bodies of cargo ships towering above, casting shadows over the docks. 

The night was silent but for the sounds of the water, the bobbing of ships, the creaking of wood and the clanking of chains, black ships reflected on black water. A moment later, an explosion ripped through the nearest vessel, the blast taking them both by surprise. Steve’s reflexes, even in a dream, were faster than Tony’s, and Tony told himself that perhaps part of that was that Steve’s mind had created the explosion. But as he reacted, Steve lunged for him, covering Tony’s body with his own as cinders and shrapnel flew past them both. 

Tony could feel Steve’s chest expand and contract with each breath as he shielded him, and if Tony’s own pulse quickened, he told himself it was because of the blast, not their proximity. Steve’s hands caught in Tony’s hair, Tony’s cap knocked to the side, one arm brushing against Tony’s cheek.

When the dust settled, Steve rolled to one side and then back onto his feet in one single, graceful motion. “Tony?” he asked, holding a gloved hand out. 

Tony took it gratefully and pulled himself up. “Not a scratch,” he said, bending down to pick up his cap. He gave Steve a lopsided grin. 

Steve looked him over, relieved, and clapped Tony on both shoulders. His hands stayed there for a long moment-- perhaps _too_ long a moment, or maybe that was Tony’s imagination. 

“Good,” Steve said, and he moved away, his jaw steeled and his expression stoic. “You can’t be too careful.” He picked his way through the debris, toward the damaged ship, which was rapidly taking on water. “You know what happened to my last partner.” 

“Yeah,” Tony said. “Yeah, I do.” 

Steve was balancing precariously, one foot on the dock, one foot on a twisted chunk of steel jutting out from the boat. His cape was flapping behind him, majestically, in the wind. “Come on. We should investigate, before this hunk of metal sinks.” 

Steve hopped aboard. 

“Sure, let’s all get on a sinking ship,” Tony replied cheerfully, as he followed behind. 

The sound of rushing water filled Tony’s ears in the cavernous belly of the cargo ship, echoing until it rose to a thunderous volume. 

“Someone,” Steve said, firmly, “is trying to keep something hidden. It’s got to be on here somewhere; we just have to figure out what it is, and where…” 

Wading through the rising seawater, they climbed a ladder onto the ship’s deck: there was a single light on at the bridge, and a black-clad figure moving in the shadows that Tony could just barely make out through the windows. 

Steve looked to Tony for confirmation, and Tony nodded back. 

“I’ll go in,” Steve said. “You keep guard at the door?” 

They reached the bridge with little difficulty, and it soon became clear what the man was doing: the entire place stunk of kerosene, but the shadowy figure was paying particular attention to a leather attache case lying on the floor. 

Steve pulled out his gun, paused for a moment outside the door to the bridge, and then fired: the pistol shot a vibrant, purple gas in the direction of the man with the kerosene, and the would-be arsonist slumped over in an instant. 

Steve shot a thumbs-up in Tony’s direction as he grabbed the case and held it aloft before he started back.

And that was when the floor collapsed beneath him. 

Another explosion rang out, the deck of the ship ignited, the bridge going up fast in flames. Steve scrambled back, a wide, fiery chasm opening up between them. 

“Catch!” he shouted, and he tossed the attache across. Tony caught it easily, then looked to Steve. 

“Jump!” Tony said. “You can make it; I’ve seen you make wider--” 

But Steve had lifted up the unconscious burglar, was carrying the man in both arms. “I need to get him clear,” he said. 

“Steve, you--”

“He’s our only witness,” Steve said, firm. “Is there a way--” 

Tony did a quick survey of their surroundings, fashioned a sort of makeshift zipline out of a pulley and some cable, fumbling as he worked as the heat turned his palms to sweat. He tossed one end of the cable across the flames below, and this time, when he looked, his thoughts flashed back to Christmas, to the Roxxon Norco, to Pepper falling to what he thought was a fiery death, and his breath started coming shorter and shorter, his vision began to swim. 

Steve sent the stranger across; Tony caught his limp body, and for a moment, Tony was tempted to remove the mask. But with one finger beneath it, he stopped, as he realized it wasn’t his secret to reveal. He took a long, deep breath, trying to get his head in order, and sent the pulley back across to Steve. 

But as the pulley flew across, the distance between them seemed to grow. Tony thought he was seeing things at first, but no: the crevasse was widening, becoming impossibly wide, wider than the ship could contain, and everything beneath them was hot, hungry fire. 

Tony stood at his side of the gap, took off his cap, wiped his sweat-soaked brow, pushing back the hair that clung, sodden, to his forehead, and held his breath. 

Steve held onto the pulley and pushed off. 

He zoomed across, but even the seconds seemed to stretch into minutes, and Tony held a hand out to catch Steve on his landing. 

Which was when something solid and blunt clocked him in the head. 

Tony went careening, stumbling over his feet, but forced himself to fall backward, away from the fiery pit, landing on his backside, his head throbbing. He rubbed at his temple-- it was tender; there was a fast-growing welt-- and staggered to his feet, just as another shadow figure-- he knew it was another, because there was his burglar, prone on the deck-- cut the cable that was providing Steve’s escape from the burning bridge. 

Tony dove for Steve without a thought; in that same instant, Steve caught onto the collapsing deck-- the jagged, twisted steel cutting through his gloves and into his palms. 

Tony clapped his hands onto Steve's forearms, and Steve snatched up his wrists, bright red blood smearing onto Tony's skin.

Steve let out a gasp, and hung for a moment like a heavy weight. Tony gripped tighter; Steve's coat was slippery against his sweaty hands, and for a moment, all Tony could think was this was like Pepper, this was just like Pepper, and how could it happen again? He couldn't let it; he--

And then realization struck. This was Steve's mind. Somewhere, some part of Steve's sleeping brain was willing this upon them, and hell if Tony knew why. Steve couldn't know: he knew about Extremis, of course, but not about this, not how closely this resembled the events of last Christmas.

Tony's chest tightened; he gritted his teeth. "C'mon, Steve," he said, his voice dry and hoarse. "I've got you; I--"

"Get the case," Steve answered in an urgent tone.

“What?” Tony asked, biting back an incredulous laugh. Steve’s coat slipped in his hands. Tony squeezed his eyes shut. It wasn’t the Norco; it wasn’t Pepper…

“The case,” Steve repeated. “We need the case-- I’ll be-- Tony! Hurry; he’s--”

Tony looked behind him, and the second man had snatched up the attache, was making his way back toward the hatch that Tony and Steve had used to access the deck. 

Tony hesitated-- the case, the case clearly had something important in it; it could house the code Tony needed to reverse whatever had been done to Steve in the waking world. But then, Steve didn’t know that was what he was looking for; his mind wouldn’t know to hide it like that. 

Tony growled. “I’m not letting you go for some damn briefcase, Steve,” he said, through gritted teeth, and he tugged, harder, even as he could feel the floor creak and moan.

“I _need_ you to get the ‘damn briefcase,’ Tony,” Steve answered, as he managed an arm up onto the deck. “I’ll take care of myself; you can’t do both.” 

“The hell I can’t!” Tony snapped, and he kicked a foot out toward the departing shadow, willing his soft, black leather boot into the form of his armor. He flicked his toes up, manually activating the jet in the sole of his boot, sending a blast of energy at the stranger, who was thrown across the deck. 

He watched the case fly into the air, arcing over their heads as it snapped open, raining its contents over the deck. 

He hauled Steve up just as the floor began to crumble away beneath them. 

Steve cartwheeled-- literally _cartwheeled_ , to Tony’s ever-expanding wonder, to safety, as Tony scrambled away from the collapsing portion of the deck. Tony stooped down, collecting the papers that had fallen from the attache. 

They were photos.

Dozens of photos, all black and white, grainy, fading, printed on yellowing paper that was brittle to the touch. 

There was Steve, the little boy, a front tooth missing, spattered with freckles he’d lost as an adult, grinning so widely that his mouth took up most of his tiny face. His knees were both bandaged, peeking out from below his short pants, his feet bare on cobblestones. 

Steve with his mother, maybe a year or two older, hair grown out too long, holding a cat that must have been calico from the grey and black patches on its back-- knuckles scraped, a mean-looking cut on his chin. 

Steve with another little boy, crouched on a streetcorner, playing marbles, a stern look of concentration on his face as he lined up his shooter. The other boy, taller, dark-haired, waving at the camera, a cat’s eye cradled in his palm. 

Tony stacked as many of the photos as he could reach, the ones that weren’t damaged by the fire or the dampness of the deck, and gathered them neatly in his hands. 

He heard a clank across the deck, and turned-- Steve had turned, too, and Tony winced as he saw Steve clasping his hands together, one wrapped tight in his purple silk handkerchief. 

The man he’d blasted with his boot was stirring; he’d swung a hand out and hit a metal drum, and Steve was approaching him cautiously. 

Tony followed suit, staying a pace behind. 

Steve dropped to one knee beside the fallen man. “Do you need medical assistance?” he asked. “Tony, radio for the--” 

But the man shook his head. 

“I need to--” Steve reached out, his hand hesitating, before he tugged at the man’s mask, pulled it over his head. 

And then Steve froze, the mask dangling from his hand. 

Tony recognized the man’s face-- from surveillance footage, from old photographs and film reels, from only-- what couldn’t have been more than an hour ago, in the real world, when he’d sliced Natasha’s face open with his knife. 

“Bucky?” Steve murmured. 

The man’s eyes went wide-- fearful, almost-- bright, unsettling blue, and he opened his mouth as if to speak. 

Steve leaned toward him. “Bucky, god, forgive me, I--” 

Tony shifted the photographs from one hand to the other. 

And then the man crumbled, crumbled like a piece of paper, like he was one of the fading photographs, bits of him flaking away, falling to the floor like ash. 

Steve watched in silence, bleeding hands open to the sky, as if he were waiting to catch something, and Tony heard him let out a choked sob. 

Tony stepped over, over the debris and damaged photos. The rain was putting out the last of the fire. 

He put a hand on Steve’s shoulder. “C’mon,” he said, softly, his voice still raspy from the smoke. “Time to go home.” 

In that funny way that dreams work, Tony didn’t remember walking to the car, apart from a funny, hazy memory of his hand on Steve’s back. He didn’t remember driving home, or arriving, or getting out of the car, or removing his jacket, cap, and mask, but here he was, stripped down to his undershirt and pants, cleaning out the cuts on Steve’s hands. 

They were ugly things, the metal having torn away the thick, callused flesh of Steve’s palms in jagged bits, and they’d bled clear through handkerchiefs, scraps of shirts, and the bandages stored in Silver Blaze by the time they’d reached the mansion. But Steve was a stoic patient, not even wincing as Tony poured antiseptic over his hands and rebandaged them. 

Finished, Tony gave the back of Steve’s hand a pat, and smiled up at the other man. 

Steve’s expression was blank, impassive. He looked away. 

“Whoever’s responsible for this,” Steve said, “it’s personal. They-- this isn’t some intrigue of the criminal underworld. This is someone trying to get to _me_ , and I can’t let them.” 

Tony was quiet. There was no way to tell Steve that the person trying to get to him was, well, his own imagination. 

“We’ll find them, Boss,” he said, hoping he sounded reassuring. “Whatever they want, we’ll figure it out.” 

Steve sucked in a breath. “I can’t help feeling like this is my punishment, for everything I-- for everyone I couldn’t save.” 

Tony bit his lip. “Believe me,” he said, and gave Steve’s shoulder a squeeze. “I know the feeling. But it’s not like that.”

“It should have been me,” Steve said, quietly. “I should never have--”

“That’s a load of bullshit, Steve,” Tony said, with a fierceness that surprised him, considering he felt that way more often than he cared to admit. “You do more good than anybody I know.” 

“It doesn’t feel that way,” Steve answered. 

Tony felt a heady impulse to pull him into an embrace. Instead, he got to his feet, shifted a little, uncertain what to do next. “You need anything else?” he asked. 

Steve was quiet again. He worried at his thumbs, glancing around the room as if he were trying to search for something. 

Steve’s hands curled into fists, and he steeled his jaw so that his chin jutted out. “I can manage,” he said, and Tony heard the same stubbornness he’d heard in Steve as a little boy, walking home alone in Brooklyn. 

Tony nodded. He wanted to reach out, do anything to reassure him that things would be all right, that this was all in Steve’s head, but he knew it was bigger than that, somehow, that he was getting a front-row seat to Steve’s mind’s attempt to cope with a world that kept taking things away from him. 

“I’ll be right next door,” Tony said, pointing a thumb in the general direction of his room. Maybe tomorrow, tomorrow they could get down to business and Tony could try to get the damn code so they could go home-- and Tony was going to talk to someone about Steve’s evident need for a visit to a psychologist. Wilson was some kind of therapist or something, wasn’t he? 

Steve looked up, and his mouth twitched, and Tony saw just how much effort it was taking for Steve to school his face to not show any emotion. "Tony?" He asked.

He looked down again, at the bandages on his hands.

"Yeah?" Tony asked.

"This is...it's personal. It's not your mess. If you want to--"

There was no way Tony could fully express the extent of his incredulity at that moment.

"We're a team, Steve," he replied, with a finality that he hoped brooked no argument. "I'm in as deep as you are."

Tony was all too aware that of the two of them, he was the only one who knew how true that was. But he smiled as Steve looked up at him, as Steve's expression softened, the corners of his mouth turning up as his brows dipped down into something wistful and too painful. 

"In my dreams, Tony," Steve said, slowly, "I told you, I've been having dreams."

"Superheroes, yeah, the future," Tony said, shrugging. "I remember."

Steve's brow furrowed. "We weren't friends in them. Not-- not like this. We worked together, but I don't think I even liked you much. Where does something like that _come from?_ "

"Just the fact that you're a man of excellent taste?" Tony answered, a touch blithe. "Maybe that's your subconscious trying to tell you something. Sometimes we hear things we don't want to tell ourselves during the day, all that New Agey crap..."

Steve raised both eyebrows, but at the same time, something in him relaxed; his shoulders dropped, he tipped his head to one side. He flexed his fingers, nearly put his hands on his hips, and then, at the last moment, remembered his bandages, and glanced down at them, as if he wasn't quite sure what to do with them in their current state. He settled for hooking his thumbs through his belt loops.

"Well," he said, smiling slightly, eyeing Tony sidelong. "In one of those dreams, somebody said you used to be infatuated with me."

That was the last thing Tony had expected to hear out of Steve's mouth--well, no, but definitely in the lowest percentile of things Tony expected Steve to say. Tony nearly choked.

"When I was a _kid_ ," Tony managed to choke out, very carefully trying to focus on anything but the barely-concealed muscles beneath Steve's shirt. "I had a poster of you on the wall, and, uh...okay, six posters." His cheeks felt hot; hell, his _feet_ felt hot.

"You're older than me," Steve pointed out. "What happened to the posters?"

Tony swore under his breath. Apparently, Midnight-Racer-Steve hadn't been frozen in ice before he woke up in fictional-1936 or whatever year it was.

"What, now I'm being interrogated?" Tony asked, rolling his eyes. "No wonder we don't get along in your dreams. Christ, Rogers..."

Steve's smile broadened, but he looked down at the floor, as if it was too bright, as if he had to keep it hidden. "My best friend told me to throw mine out, or I'd never get a girl."

"Throw your what out?" Tony asked.

"My Midnight Racer poster," Steve replied. He looked almost sheepish. "That was before...well, I had any idea I'd end up _here_ , of all places."

Tony couldn't decide if he was warm, if the room was warm, or if this whole situation was just getting way too self-reflexive.

Tony pressed a hand to his temple. "Funny how it works out," he managed weakly.

"So I suppose nobody in your dreams ever said anything like that about me?" Steve asked.

"That would be a little bit out of the realm of possibility, wouldn't it?" The last thing Tony wanted to do was explain, to any version of Steve, subconscious or not, the exact nature of the dreams adolescent Tony had about Captain America.

"I don't know which one of us you're selling short, Tony."

"What?"

"What I'm trying to say," Steve said, shifting to stand up straighter, looking Tony directly in the eye, "is that I may not be my predecessor, but I hope that doesn’t mean--” 

Tony balked. It was the dream; it had to be the dream, the roles Steve’s mind had slotted them into-- if he was being completely honest with himself, the Midnight Racer television show had _definitely_ been up there on the list of early inspiration for his own fantasies: the two leading men acted way too much like a married couple, there was a heat and intensity to their interactions, and a warm affection that was undeniable, and the Racer was always coming up with preposterous excuses to stand up his dates-- ones that usually involved going undercover with the Chauffeur. But the fact that Steve seemed to see them the same way...made him wonder, at any rate.

Steve stopped speaking and leaned back, obviously sensing the change in Tony’s demeanor. 

“It doesn’t mean anything,” Tony said, taking a breath. “But, look, Steve, you’re hurt, you’re not thinking straight--” He immediately regretted his choice of vocabulary. “Someone’s playing to your vulnerabilities; it’s leaving you--”

“ _This_ ,” Steve said, irritation creeping into his voice. “This is why we hate each other in my dreams. Because you’re too preoccupied with knowing _better_ than everyone else all the time.” 

“Steve, _trust me_ , you’re not equipped to have this kind of conversation right now,” Tony said, wincing even as he said it. 

“Right now is when it matters,” Steve snapped. His eyes were sharp, bright, fierce, and inwardly, Tony was rather impressed with his ability to completely turn the tide of a conversation, in spite of it turning _precisely_ away from where he wanted it to go. 

Steve looked away, took a breath, then looked back. “I’m asking you not to go, Tony,” he said. “Sleep in the chair, for all I care. Just don’t _go_.” 

Tony’s brain worked back, from the Midnight Racer, to something Natasha had mentioned, to Sharon’s comment when Tony had asked her about dating. “Is this why you’re always too busy to date?” he asked, slowly. 

“You’re an ass,” Steve informed him. He sighed, then turned, pinching his nose. “I’m going to take a shower,” he said. 

“Bath,” Tony corrected. “You have to keep your hands dry.”

“ _Really_?” Steve asked, his tone disbelieving. “Did you really--” 

The first volley of gunfire blew out the window and left a trail in the wall that ended where it splintered the bathroom door into smithereens. 

They both dove to the floor, Steve reaching for the silver coffee tray Tony had brought up earlier and using it to deflect the shots. Steve gave Tony a pointed look and nodded toward the door. Tony nodded, crawling across the floor until they were both safely in the hall, then slammed the door. They stayed low, crouching as they made their way toward the stairway. 

“You okay, Cap?” Tony asked. 

“What about your cap?” Steve replied, giving Tony a confused look. 

Tony shook his head. “Never mind.” 

There was a loud crash, and the domed glass cupola in the roof of the foyer shattered inward, as a dozen black-clad agents of some sort or another rappelled in. 

Tony groaned as he saw the all-too-Nazi-esque armbands they wore-- with a pattern of red on black that had become very familiar to him in recent months. Their clothing was sharply tailored, more like what Tony himself had been wearing an hour ago than like a modern uniform, but it was recognizable all the same.

“The Brotherhood of the Hydra!” Steve whispered at him, as they ducked back into the hall. “I should have known.” 

A bullet took a hunk of the wall out, just above Steve’s head, and Steve raised his coffee tray and shot purple gas over his shoulder. Their assailant slumped over, but was soon replaced by two more. 

“Ha, ha, cut off one head and two grow back,” Tony muttered. A cupola. A glass fucking cupola, right in the center of the house. It was a terrible vulnerability for a place that should have kept security as a priority. “What kind of architect,” he started to say, before he realized that the architect was _Steve_.

And he knew, in that moment, that while he couldn’t build upon Steve’s dreamspace, he could, maybe, influence the way Steve populated it. “We need to get to the workshop,” he said.

“What was that?” Steve asked, as he repelled more gunfire-- but the coffee tray was looking pretty busted-up already. 

Tony didn’t like their chances of getting out of this, and he suspected that the projections were coming for them because he’d used the boot on the ship, or maybe it was Steve’s subconscious being repulsed by the conversation they’d just had? He couldn’t say. What he could say was that more Hydra-Brotherhood-or-whatever-Steve-called-them-assholes were swarming into the mansion, and he was becoming less and less certain that they’d make it out alive. 

Tony grimaced up at the HYDRA agents descending by the dozens through the shattered cupola. “I’ve installed a new defence system, it’ll give us-- an hour, maybe two, if the house’s security’s been breached. We can regroup there, decide whether to make a stand or take Silver Blaze and go.” 

“We could try to take them,” Steve said, reaching for his gun. 

“You have a coffee tray and a gun that shoots sleeping gas,” Tony pointed out. “I have my fists.” 

“And whatever you used back on the ship,” Steve reminded him. “The thing in your shoe. Don’t think I didn’t see that.” 

Tony sighed. “Right. And that.” 

“Well,” said Steve. “I’m liking our odds.” 

“I’d like our odds better if we had a defense system and an arsenal,” Tony answered. 

Steve shot another one of the agents with the gas gun. 

“And more time,” Tony added, as the purple fog swirled around the man, putting him to sleep. 

“Well, I can buy you more time,” Steve said, as he got off another shot. 

Tony watched the sleeping man on the floor. “I know you can,” he answered, and then scrambled to his feet, racing for his own bedroom. 

“Wait--” Steve caught up to him, catching him by the elbow. He dropped his hand quickly when Tony looked down at it, and Tony didn’t know if it was discomfort or the pain in his palm. “What are you doing?” 

“Getting into the workshop through the secret back entrance,” Tony answered, as if it was obvious. 

“What secret back entrance?” 

Tony pulled open the door to his room. “The one behind my mother’s portrait.”

* * *

The shaft behind the portrait was sealed by a vault door, and Tony spun it shut, then gave it a pat and mentally thanked Steve’s imagination for coming up with something so secure. 

They climbed down a sturdy steel ladder, and out into the workshop through another vault door that sealed hermetically behind them. 

“Right,” Tony said. He hadn’t quite thought about the fact that Steve, not he, would know how to activate the defense system. 

He licked his lips. “Wanna guess how it works?” 

Steve glanced around, curious. “Shields up?” he tried.

Tony laughed at the sheer simplicity of Steve’s design, as thick metal plates slid into place, blocking off the doors, fortifying the walls. An internal ventilation system began to whir. 

Steve grinned, and turned full circle to watch the automation in action. “When did you do this?” he asked. “You didn’t tell me about this.” 

“I just did,” Tony answered. He reached in his pocket, checked for the shield, gave it a pat, and then began opening drawers until he found precisely what he needed. 

He pulled the Dreamvision device out-- in this dream, it was in a leather attache case not unlike the one that had been full of Steve’s old photos. 

“What are you thinking, Tony?” Steve asked. “You...you look like you have a plan.” 

Tony carried the Dreamvision device to the coffee table, sat down on the sofa checked the vials and needles. “I do,” he answered. 

Steve frowned, and circled the coffee table to stand over Tony’s shoulder. “With some kind of medical contraption?” 

Gunfire rattled one of the heavy steel doors. 

Tony eyed Steve cautiously. “Do you still trust me?” 

“Sti-- what?” Steve asked. His voice pitched up at the end, as if he was hurt by the mere suggestion that he might not. 

“I need you to say it,” Tony replied. “Do you trust me?” 

Steve climbed over the back of the sofa, dropping into the seat beside Tony. “Of course I do,” he said. “You know I do.” 

“Hold out your arm,” Tony said. Steve did so, cautiously, and Tony inserted the IV.

Tony turned his own arm out to Steve. “And I need you to do the same to me.” 

Steve, fortunately, was quick, precise, and fastidious enough that the needle went in without much difficulty, and Tony only winced a little as it punctured his skin. But he gave Tony a questioning look. “I don’t understand,” he said. “What are you doing?” 

“Buying us more time,” Tony said. It wasn’t entirely a lie. In fact, it was entirely true, even if it maybe wasn’t the _complete_ truth. “I can use our combined brainpower to exponentially increase the amount of time we have to solve this predicament.” 

Steve’s eyebrows shot up. “And when did you learn how to do _this_?” he asked. 

“A long time ago,” Tony replied. “But I made some mistakes with my calculations back then.” 

“Oh?”

“Like you can’t do this without someone you trust,” Tony answered. He meant it as a matter of fact, but Steve...Steve smiled, hesitantly, and took hold of Tony’s hand. 

He held it loosely, as if he expected Tony to pull his own hand away, but Tony couldn’t quite bring himself to do it. Instead, he splayed his fingers, alternated them with Steve’s. 

Tony took a breath. “I need you to do one more thing.” 

“Of course,” Steve said. 

“Shoot me,” Tony said. “With the gas gun.” 

“ _What_?!” Steve objected. “Tony, I can’t--” 

“Trust me,” Tony replied. “Shoot me, and then you.”

“That’ll put us both to sleep,” Steve said, still shaking his head. 

“Exactly,” Tony said, and he nodded. 

Steve shut his eyes, as if steeling himself. 

There was a loud blast-- some kind of explosion-- outside. The heavy door rattled, but held firm.

Steve glanced up at it, and took out his gun. 

With his finger on the trigger, he pointed it at Tony, then stopped, and withdrew it, giving Tony a long, hard look. 

“Steve, what--” Tony started. 

Steve kissed him. 

His lips were hot, rough, hasty; the kiss was a declaration, an exclamation point.

For a moment, Tony thought he must be dreaming, then realized that of _course_ he was dreaming, but then, this really was Steve kissing him, or some version or portion of Steve, at least, and he wondered if he always had a frantic running internal monologue going whenever someone he’d spent his entire adolescence fantasizing about kissed him, even if that someone _thought_ he was a different someone whom Tony had spent slightly less time fantasizing about. 

It was around this point that he realized he probably ought to kiss back, or Steve would think something was wrong. 

“I’m sorry,” Steve said. “Is something wrong?” 

“No,” Tony said, and he laughed. The laugh felt good, too, a release of nervous energy. He reached for a handful of Steve’s shirt and pulled him forward to kiss him back. 

Steve’s free, still-bandaged, hand found its way to Tony’s back, pressing firmly against it. “Good,” Steve answered. “Because I do. I trust you.” 

Steve pulled the trigger, and they were both engulfed with purple sleeping gas.


	6. Christmas Dreaming

“There’s no way,” said a woman’s voice. “Steve, tell him there’s no way.” 

Tony blinked, trying to get a gauge of his surroundings. Tinny Christmas music played-- Frank Sinatra crooned from somewhere across the room. He was sitting on a red velveteen sofa decorated with a hand-crocheted afghan in a small, cozy living room that felt, from its layout, like a townhouse out in Queens-- a staircase to one side, trimmed with evergreen and bows, an archway leading into a dining room behind him. 

The room was warm, all aglow with golden lights from the Christmas tree displayed just at the window. The ornaments were all handmade: strung popcorn and berries and beer bottle caps, a paper angel at the top. An empty glass ringed with a coating of something buttery-yellow-white and flecks of brown sat on the coffee table in front of him, on a cork coaster. 

The woman was young, pretty, brunette, with big brown eyes full of light. She was wearing a modest red dress with a tapered waist and a big circle skirt, and her hair was pinned up neatly. 

Steve stepped in beside her: he was wearing plain blue slacks and a pink buttondown shirt, his blue tie loosened, the top button of his shirt unbuttoned, a pretty crystal glass in his hand. He put his left hand on her shoulder, leaned in and kissed the back of her neck, fondly. 

_Peggy_ , Tony realized, giving the woman another look. This was Peggy Carter, back when she was young. 

“The snow’s a beast,” Steve said, nodding at the window. “We can’t let you leave in this.”

“Please stay for lunch,” she added, and caught at Steve’s hand with her own. “At this rate, none of our guests are going to show.” 

It was then that Tony saw their rings: two matching gold bands. He felt a twinge in his chest, and groped for the shield in his pocket, turning it over.

“I’d really better be--” he started, though he knew he _needed_ to stay. He pulled the shield out of his pocket, checking the paint job: brightly-colored, as he expected. 

“Do you _see_ what it looks like out there?” Steve asked. “You’re going to freeze; you’re not imposing if you stay. There’s no way you’ll get back out to Long Island in this.” 

It had just been a dream then-- of course it was a dream, but nothing Steve had said had been anything _real_. It was no more real than the time Tony had dreamed that he’d had a threesome with Clint and that girl from the American Apparel ads on a speedboat, and had woken up with a bad taste in his mouth and spent the entirety of their morning status call not acknowledging Clint’s presence because all he could do was imagine how actually painful naked water skiing would be in real life. 

Still, he couldn’t help but feel a little bit of disappointment and jealousy creep in when he saw how Steve looked at Peggy, how Peggy looked back at Steve, how they folded together and whispered shared secrets into each other’s ears. 

“Fine,” he said, shaking his head. “Lunch it is, I suppose.” 

Steve reached for the empty glass on the table. “Can I get you more egg nog, Howard?” 

Howard. 

_Howard_. 

Tony looked down at his hands, at his-- god, at his perfect manicure...he couldn’t remember when that happened, and the cufflinks-- beautiful gold-and-onyx cufflinks that he’d only inherited one of. 

He flashed Steve a broad grin. “You got anything stronger than an egg nog?” 

“You just want to break into that scotch you brought over, don’t you?” Peggy teased, wriggling her nose at him. 

Steve reached for a bottle of amber-colored liquid-- and Tony noticed, with some amusement, that Steve’s absolute lack of knowledge of spirits extended into the dreamworld: the bottle said “FINE SCOTCH” in large, looping letters on a metallic gold label, and then “Product of France” below. 

A sound-- a high-pitched, whining sound-- came from upstairs. Peggy sighed, and waved a hand. “Let me go check on Sarah-- I only just put her down; she shouldn’t be--”

Steve handed Tony his scotch and looked up. “I can go, Peg,” he said. “You’ve been cooking all this--” 

Peggy smiled affectionately at him. “No, no, you boys talk.” She smirked. “Howard, tell him about our surprise.” She started for the stairs, the baby’s cries growing louder in volume. 

“Surprise?” Tony asked. He took a sip of the whiskey-- and nearly spit it out. It tasted like stale Halloween candy corn mixed with rubbing alcohol. 

“What surprise?” Steve asked, looking between the two of them. 

Peggy only smirked and waggled her eyebrows. “Merry Christmas, Steve,” she said, and blew him a kiss before she ascended the staircase. 

“It’s _Boxing Day_!” Steve called up the stairs with a grin. 

“What’s this surprise?” Steve asked, looking back to Tony as he took a seat on the sofa beside him. 

Tony looked down at his candy-scotch, then back at the stairs, entirely uncertain what to say. 

The baby stopped crying. 

"Howard?" Steve asked. "Is everything--"

"Fine," Tony assured him with a smile. "Just-- this scotch tastes like shit."

"I hate to be the one to break it to you, Stark," Steve replied, “but scotch always tastes like shit."

Steve paused, took a breath. "Look, I know I've been away," he said. "Helping out in Europe and Japan-- it's important to me, but they're winding down, and this is where I want to be. With--- with Peggy and Sarah, and you and all the guys. Peg thinks I oughtta finish school, you know, with the GI Bill we won't have to pay for it, but I-- what you're doing down in DC is important. I want to be part of it."

So this was it, Tony thought. This was the deepest part of Steve's subconscious, the part he buried below surface fears and memories, below childhood escapist fantasies. A modest little home, a family, an ordinary life -- as ordinary as Captain America could ever have, he supposed-- where no one was old, no one was dead. A _baby_.

"Steve," Tony said slowly. "You know there'll always be a place for you at SHIELD. Take your--"

"SHIELD?" Steve asked, eyes widening. "Is that the surprise? You have a name?"

Tony laughed. "I'm not sure which surprise Peggy meant," he admitted. 

Steve smiled. "Look, Howard," he said, a gleam in his eye. "I've got to go to Nagasaki next month."

Tony winced, internally. It was one of the things he knew had haunted his father to his grave, that he'd advised on nuclear weapons that went on to cause such tremendous devastation. "Yeah?" He asked, uncomfortably.

"I..." Steve ran a hand through his hair. "I was sort of hoping you'd come."

"Me?" Tony asked. "Steve, I don't know if that's a good idea; I doubt the folks over there want to see me."

"Are you joking?" Steve asked. "You're a hero, Stark. The fact that you fought to hold off on the bombs at the eleventh hour and send me over to negotiate instead?"

Tony went cold. "I didn't..."

"Since when are you humble about anything?" Steve teased. "I know, I know, it's not official, but everyone knows you were responsible. Just think about it, won't you?"

"I..." He'd only be here for a day or so, at most. He could promise anything. "Sure, pal."

The doorbell rang, and Steve looked up. "Really?" He said, as he pushed himself up from the sofa. 

“Your promise,” sang Frank Sinatra, “Must be the reason the happy season is here.” 

Steve opened the door to a red-nosed, red-cheeked Bucky, who stomped snow off on the doormat, dropped a stack of colorfully-wrapped gifts into Steve’s arms, and unbuttoned a heavy coat. 

“You need to shovel your walk; it’s a mess,” Bucky said, as he ran his hands through damp, dark hair that was plastered to his forehead, his knit cap abandoned on a hook. 

“Merry Christmas to you, too, Buck. How’re the folks?” 

“Still asking why you two didn’t come to Christmas dinner,” Bucky said, jabbing Steve in the side with his elbow. 

“Peg was working, and the baby has a cold,” Steve answered. 

“The baby, the baby, all they talk about is the baby. They’re still ribbing me that you gave ‘em a grandchild first.” Bucky grinned over at Tony and waved. “Hey, Stark; what’re you drinking?” 

Tony poured Bucky a glass of the terrible scotch and made room on the sofa.

“So I’m dreaming my Christmas dreaming a little early this year,” sang Sinatra. 

He couldn't do it. He couldn't wake Steve up from this, could he? The very idea seemed cruel.

Steve was standing with the stack of gifts; they threatened to topple even in his enormous arms. “What the hell did you go and get all these presents for?” He walked over to the tree, very carefully, and laid the packages out beneath it.

“They’re for the kiddo,” Bucky answered. “I don’t know what babies like, and she keeps growing so fast, I just bought her a whole bunch of things...I remembered you always wanted a fire truck when we were kids…”

Steve laughed and joined them on the sofa, sitting next to Tony, leaning across to talk to Bucky. 

“She’s too little for a fire truck, Buck,” Steve answered. 

The lights all around the room played off Steve’s hair, picking out the gold and making it wink as he moved, and he was so close that Tony could smell his aftershave, the bright notes of spice and pine that were a sharp contrast to the Steve of the previous dream, his scents of vanilla, leather and tobacco. 

“She’ll grow into it, then,” Bucky said with a shrug. “And you get to play with it in the meantime.” 

Peggy came back downstairs, with the baby in her arms-- a chubby little ball wrapped in a soft green blanket, all pink skin and soft brown hair, and surprisingly good-natured for a baby whose runny nose seemed committed to starting a small flood. Tony never knew what to _do_ with babies, but, satisfied that he couldn’t actually break a baby who was really only a figment of Steve’s imagination, he held her when Peggy asked, and didn’t even flinch when she tried to grab his nose with a snot-covered hand. 

He wondered, though, what it meant, that here he was, in Steve’s dream, seeing Steve’s subconscious desires, and his imaginary kid was clearly in misery from a cold, when Steve could have imagined that she’d inherit the effects of the serum.

When Steve went into the kitchen to help Peggy with lunch, Tony watched him go, then looked back down at the baby balanced in his lap. “See your dad?” he asked, softly. 

Sarah laughed and made a raspberry sound. 

“Yeah,” Tony said, a little wistfully. “He’s a smart guy. Maybe smarter than he realizes.” 

They ate lunch: grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup, perfect food for the snowy weather outside, followed by an announcement from Bucky that he was the snowball fight champion of New York, and he was taking all comers. 

After objections from Peggy that if she didn’t have to stay in and watch a sick baby, Bucky’s title would be in real peril, and promises from Steve that he would do the dishes and make hot cocoa when they came back in, the three men put on their winter gear and tromped outside. 

Between two soldiers-- one with superhuman abilities, Tony was dead in the water (or snow, rather), and managed to get a face stuffed full of snow in the first minute. 

“This is hardly fair!” he objected, after spitting the snow from his mouth. But Steve and Bucky were already wrestling each other down into a drift, shouting and laughing like little boys. 

Tony, not to be outdone, crept around the back of the row of townhouses, and located an old-- well, new for the time, he supposed-- lawnmower, and got to work. 

It took him ten minutes and a wrench to transform the mower into a snowball-pelting machine.

“Cheat!” Bucky cried, as he was pummelled with snow. 

“I distinctly remember no rules prohibiting machinery,” Tony answered cheerfully, watching is machine turn the two younger men into reasonable facsimiles of yeti. 

“To be fair,” Steve conceded, “It did shovel the walk.” 

Steve walked over to Tony, and held a hand out. “Stark, my good man,” he said, with a deferential nod, “I think you win this one.” 

Tony grinned and took the proffered mitten, shaking it firmly. 

And Steve smacked him in the face with an enormous payload of snow-- loose, unpacked, soft but bitterly cold. 

Tony choked out his objection, but was met with a volley of snowballs, in quick succession. He ran, skidding on the thin, wet layer of snow on the walkway he’d just cleared, but finally managed to gather up an armful of snow of his own. 

Braving the onslaught of snowballs thrown so fast they may have been artillery for all Tony knew, he fought his way back to Steve and mashed two handfuls of snow back into Steve’s face.

Steve burst out laughing, and, without a moment’s hesitation, picked Tony up and slung him over his shoulder. 

“The _hell_ , Rogers!” Tony growled, wriggling in an attempt to make himself particularly difficult to carry. He could hear Bucky cackling with glee, but couldn’t twist enough to give him a dirty look. 

Steve marched to the end of the street, where a Dead End sign marked a brick wall, and snow had drifted up against it into a high pile, then unceremoniously dumped Tony in. 

Tony did the only respectable thing he could, given the circumstances, and caught his arms around Steve’s neck.

“Stark!” Steve yelled, but his voice was breathless and gleeful.

The two fell with a thump, powdery snow flying up into a cloud around them. 

Steve threw his arms out at the last minute, just barely avoiding full-on collision, and he grinned down at Tony, shaking his head. 

He flicked a lump of snow off Tony’s nose. “But I win that one,” he teased, before he picked himself back up and offered Tony a hand. 

They stripped out of their winter things on the stoop, so as not to track snow back inside, and Steve, true to his word, gathered up the dishes to wash them while Bucky demanded his chance to play with the baby. The house was lit with dozens of glowing, golden candles: in the time the men had been outside, they’d lost electricity, and Peggy had taken it upon herself to do something about it. 

“Stark,” Steve called. “Come help me wash up?” 

Tony obliged, making his way into the tiny-but-serviceable kitchen at the back of the house. He rolled up his sleeves, picked up a dish towel, and started drying the dishes as Steve washed them. 

“We’re real happy you finally took us up on an invitation, Howard,” Steve said. His words were careful, measured. “I hate to think of you being all alone, especially at the holidays, and you’ve been so good to us.” 

Tony shrugged. “It’s nothing, Steve,” he said, a little sheepishly. 

“Well, you know you’re always welcome, is what I’m trying to say,” Steve assured him. He checked the milk heating on the stove. “Our home is yours.” 

“I’ll remember that,” Tony assured him. “I just don’t want to...you know, intrude.” 

It was true in more ways than he could say. 

“You’re _not_ ,” Steve said, and he turned to look at Tony. There was a touch of something defiant in his voice, in his look, and he put down the cloth he was using to wash. “And to think, when I first met you, I was convinced you had a thing for Peggy.” 

Tony laughed, but it gave him pause. That was something he’d never suspected, but now he wondered. He shook his head. “Couldn’t be further from the truth, Steve.” 

“I know,” Steve said. He returned to the dishes. “But I keep thinking, we were lucky. We-- If something had gone wrong, there’s-- you’re one of the people I trust most, Stark, after everything’s been said and done.”

Tony took a deep breath. “So, uh,” he said. “About that surprise.” 

Steve perked up at that, raised an eyebrow. “Oh?” 

“The kill switch,” Tony said. “I want to turn it off. Permanently.” 

Steve blinked. “What?” 

“The way I figure, the only thing anybody can use it for now is to hurt you. If you’re gonna come work for us at SHIELD...it’s too risky. I want it off. I think I can reverse engineer a…” 

He _knew_ he could; he and Bruce had puzzled out the part of the protein string they had already. 

Steve nearly dropped the plate he was holding. “Really?” 

“Yeah,” Tony said. “Pretend it’s a Christmas present, whatever you want, okay?” 

“Yeah,” Steve agreed. He swallowed, put down the dish and the towel. The milk was boiling on the stove. “Just a…” 

Steve poured scalding milk into four mugs, stirred in cocoa powder, and arranged them on a tray. “Okay,” he said. He was breathing slowly; his hands were trembling slightly.

“Here,” Tony said, and he didn’t wait for a response as he picked up the tray. “I’ll take that.” 

By the time they’d finished their cocoa, it was getting dark, the snow hadn’t stopped, and Bucky’s attempt to open the front door was met with a two-foot snowdrift pushing back. 

“Well, you’re not going home in this,” Peggy determined, peering through the curtains. 

Steve put the baby to bed, Peggy reheated the Christmas leftovers, and then the four of them stayed up late into the night, snow still falling softly outside. They played cards, drank coffee, ate ham sandwiches and Christmas cookies that Steve had iced with impressively intricate designs that almost made Tony feel guilty to eat them, all while Peggy and Tony regaled the boys with stories of working at SHIELD.

The convenient thing about it being a dream was that Tony could make things up, and Peggy would laugh and agree and there was no sign that he was pulling things out of his ass. 

Still, it got later and later and though Tony reminded Steve a few times, he hadn’t managed to get Steve to surrender the code. He had-- he’d told Steve in the Midnight Racer’s workshop that they had an hour, maybe two-- multiplied by twelve, that gave him between twelve hours and a day in this dream. It had been just after noon when he’d showed, now it was nearing midnight, and Steve kept shrugging, and saying of course, of course, he’d get it to him before he left. 

But it was clear that no one was leaving the little house until the next morning at the earliest, and as the candles burned lower, the lights flickering amber against the walls, Peggy went upstairs and rescued a set of Steve’s pajamas for Tony and another for Bucky. Thy swam on both of them, but especially Tony, who had to roll up both the cuffs and the waistband of Steve’s pajama pants. There was a day bed in the nursery, which Bucky claimed, and Steve brought down pillows and blankets and left Tony with the sofa. 

“Steve,” Tony said again, trying one more time. He pulled out the little notebook his father had always kept in his pocket when he was a child, held it out to Steve, tapped at a blank page. 

“What are you going to do,” Steve asked, “run off and experiment in the middle of a blizzard?” 

“Maybe,” Tony said, dryly. 

“Look,” Steve said, curling his arms around his waist. “I don’t mean to sound ungrateful, but I’d like to talk it over with Peg first. It’s not the kind of decision to make lightly, and we can’t reverse it. I’d rather take my time.” 

Tony racked his brain for an excuse, almost told Steve that the serum was breaking down, that he needed the kill switch to try to fix it, but he couldn’t, he couldn’t break Steve’s heart like that. Even if this was all a fantasy, it seemed cruel to puncture it. 

So he nodded, said he understood, and let Steve go to bed, watching him ascend the little staircase, his eyes lingering there even after Steve had gone. 

The house, he decided. The house was part of Steve’s subconscious, too, and now that Steve knew he was looking for the kill switch, Steve’s mind might have implanted it somewhere in the house. The first floor was small enough; he could easily do a full sweep of the place. 

He got up and made his way over to the little rolltop desk at the front door, the one where a small pile of mail had accumulated, and began sifting through papers. 

He became so engrossed that he didn’t hear the steps on the staircase until it was too late. 

“Stark?” Bucky asked. “What are you--” 

Tony backed away from the desk so quickly that he knocked over a few unopened envelopes. “I--” he said, flustered, stooping to pick them up. 

Bucky’s brow creased. “You’re looking for it, aren’t you?” he asked. 

“Looking for what?” Tony said, trying his hardest to seem the picture of innocence. 

“I overheard what you said to Steve,” Bucky said, crossing his arms over his chest. “And he won’t give it to you, will he?” 

Tony shrugged, putting the envelopes down carefully. “He said he had to--”

“He’s stalling,” Bucky answered. Bucky wandered into the dining room, came back with two glasses and the rest of the bottle of terrible Scotch. He sat down on the sofa, poured two drinks, and downed his own entirely before offering the other to Tony. 

Tony hesitated a moment before joining him. He picked up the glass, but didn’t drink-- his last run-in with that awful stuff had been bad enough. 

“The thing with Steve,” Bucky said, after he’d wiped his mouth on his arm. “Is he’s always been the conscience. Between the two of us, y’know. He’s always putting his ideals first, always struggling to decide what’s _right_ before thinking about himself. Me, I’ve always been the-- I guess, the head to his heart. The number of times I’ve had to step in and be his sense of self-preservation--” 

Bucky chuckled, rolled his eyes, shook his head. “Sometimes I wonder what the hell he’d do without me. At least there’s Peggy. He needs people with a few less morals and a little more common sense.” 

Tony smiled at Bucky, clasping his drink in both hands. There was something all too amusing about the fact that there was this little part of Steve’s mind that knew this about himself, that had to dress that part of his thought process up as an old friend just to give it any credence. “Yeah,” Tony said. “I’ve noticed.” 

Bucky crooked a finger at him. “Gimme that little pad you always carry,” he said. 

Tony raised an eyebrow, but rifled through the pile of clothing he’d folded up at one end of the coffee table, found the book, and passed it across. 

Bucky wrote down a string that looked suspiciously like a peptide sequence, and passed it back. “Merry Christmas,” he said. “Don’t tell Steve.” 

Tony squinted at the sequence, committed it to memory, and then closed the notebook. “You knew it?” he asked. 

“Of course,” Bucky answered. He poured himself some more scotch. “You think _anything_ about that kid escapes me?” 

Bucky swirled his drink, then clapped Tony’s shoulder, and stood up. “I’m gonna take the rest of this upstairs,” he said. “You have a good night.”

* * *

Bucky was halfway up the stairs when the house began to shake. He dropped his glass; it didn’t shatter, but scotch spilled on the carpet. 

“Shit!” Bucky swore, diving for the glass. “What the hell was that? Don’t tell me there’s a fucking earthquake when we’ve just had two feet of snow dumped on us.” 

"I don't know," Tony answered, even though he was all too aware. The walls shook; the Christmas tree rustled. In the next room, dishes rattled in the cabinet, there was a loud series of successive bangs that sounded suspiciously-- and Tony, for just a moment, thought he could smell a whiff of tobacco.

Upstairs, the baby howled. A minute later, and Steve and Peggy were coming down the stairs, infant in Steve’s arms. “Basement,” Steve ordered, and no one argued. Tony pulled the afghan off the sofa and wrapped it around his shoulders before they hurried down the rickety cellar stairs. Peggy brought a few candles, set them on the floor with one large kerosene lantern, and lit them. They all sat on the two folding camp beds, huddled around the faint, flickering lights, as if their meager heat could somehow warm them. 

Even in the basement, the carefully-organized shelves of canned goods were shaking, a few tipping and falling to the cement floor with a series of clunks. The baby was still crying; Steve was rocking her and singing softly. 

“I’ve got sunshine on a cloudy day,” Steve sang. Tony was surprised to hear that Steve had a rather pleasant singing voice-- it wasn’t anything special, and he was crooning more than singing, but he sounded quite nice doing it. 

There was another loud crash, and something that sounded suspiciously like gunfire. 

Peggy, a thick, fluffy robe wrapped around her pajamas, jumped to her feet. “I’m going to barricade the door,” she said. 

“I should--” Steve objected. 

Sarah wailed. 

“When it’s cold outside,” Steve sang, “I’ve got the month of May.” 

“No,” Peggy said. “You stay here; I’ll be right back.” 

“I guess you’d say, what can make me feel this-- Peg, at least take Bucky.” 

Tony blinked as something jogged into place, mentally. “Is that the _Temptations_?” he asked. 

“Yeah, Sam--” Steve looked up at him, and froze, his eyes wide, his mouth slightly open, his skin dead pale. 

Everything else began to fall away: the walls, the ceiling, the shelves of canned goods. Peggy’s nightgown began to unravel, a single thread pulling out from one corner, unspooling itself into a pile on the floor. 

Steve’s lips moved silently for a moment, as if he couldn’t quite give voice to what he was about to say. His brow creased; he shook his head.

“Tony?” 

Sarah screamed. Steve clutched her close, stroked her head with one hand, and the brown of her hair wiped off on his palm, leaving a long smear, like paint. 

Bucky was freezing; he was turning into clear, grey ice, becoming translucent as Tony watched, and his foot, nearest the lantern, was beginning to melt. 

Tony lifted the lantern, smashing it against the floor, so the flame guttered and the oil spilled slick across the concrete. 

“Tony?” Steve asked. “What the _hell_ is this?” He climbed to his feet, still clinging futilely to the baby who was now disintegrating, the color flaking from her as if she were an antique doll. 

When Peggy’s robe was entirely reduced to thread, _she_ began unravelling, thread like pale flesh falling in soft, glimmering piles on the floor. 

“It’s a dream,” Tony answered. “You’re trapped in a dream.” 

Steve shut his eyes. “But you’re real,” he said, as a hunk of ceiling smashed to the floor, just barely missing him. 

“I’m real,” Tony answered. 

“But everyth--” 

Steve’s voice faltered. 

As if to answer the question he hadn’t managed to finish, the baby in his arms turned into a writhing mass of snakes, green and black and hissing softly as they coiled around Steve’s hands, his arms…

Steve threw the snakes to the floor, but the moment they hit the concrete, the floor itself began to undulate, uncoil, grow smooth, scaled skin. 

That was enough to send Tony to his feet, and he backed toward Steve, as if he were placing himself between Steve and whatever horrible thing his own mind could concoct next. 

“Everything else is part of the dream,” Tony assured him. “You’re...you’re waking up. Or you will be, soon. That’s why all of this…” 

He waved at the snakes. “Just be careful not to get bitten, okay, buddy? You’ve worried me enough, lately.” 

And everything else melted away. They were alone, in the grey space between sleep and waking, and Steve shook a lone snake free of the cuff of his pajama pants, still staring at Tony with a lost expression. 

“I don’t have a daughter,” he said, slowly, quietly.

Tony shook his head. “No. Sorry.” 

“And Bucky?” 

Tony wasn’t quite sure how to answer that. He considered lying and saying he was dead, just to make it simpler. “Missing.” 

Steve bit his lower lip, but nodded, as if he’d known that would be the answer. 

“Howard?”

“Dead.” 

“I’m sorry,” Steve said softly. 

Tony shook his head. “It’s been twenty years.”

Steve nodded. “Peggy?”

“Alive. A million years old, but fine. I saw her yesterday.”

“She’s good?” Steve asked. 

“The best,” Tony assured him. 

There was another loud crash, and even there, in the void, Tony lost his balance, stumbling as the space began to shake.

Steve caught him by the arm, steadying him before he fell. Somehow, Tony realized, over the course of their conversation, they had shifted until they were face to face. 

“She’s the one,” Steve said, not removing his hand from Tony’s arm, “who told you about the kill switch, isn’t she?” 

Tony wasn’t sure how much to say. He waggled his hands, flashed Steve a lopsided grin. “Ahhh...in a manner of speaking. Steve,” he said, more serious. “Something happened, and you won’t wake up. If Brucey and I reverse engineer a fix...it’s the best chance we’ve got.”

The banging, the sounds of gunfire, they seemed to go on forever, now, deafening and impossible to recover from. Another shift threw Tony off his feet.


	7. New York Kiss

Tony woke up. He blinked, bleary-eyed, and found himself stretched out on a leather sofa, his head against Steve’s chest, their limbs tangled together. Steve was still holding the gas gun in one bandaged hand, his other hand twisted into the fabric of Tony’s shirt. Tony grimaced, then very gingerly slipped the gun from Steve’s fingers and removed it to the coffee table. 

The heavy steel door rattled.

“Steve,” he whispered. “Steve, you need to wake up.” 

Steve’s eyelashes-- stupidly long, golden lashes, the kind beauty queens envied-- fluttered, and he murmured something that Tony couldn’t quite make out. But he didn’t wake up, not properly. 

Tony groaned. The doors seemed to be holding-- but, of course, those were Steve’s projections attacking, and for all Tony knew, the minute he woke Steve up, they would be able to break through. 

He looked back at Steve, who was frowning, twitching slightly, his arm-- the one that had been holding the gun-- jerking as he slept. 

“Tony?” he muttered. “Tony, where--” 

And Tony realized he’d left Steve alone in that grey space. 

Steve’s hands fumbled, groping at the air, at the place where Tony had been lying moments ago. Tony winced, gritted his teeth, wondered what the hell Steve would think of all this when he woke up.

There was a loud explosion; the room rattled again. 

He shook his head. ”Fuck it,” he said, and lay back down, inhaling deeply of the scents of tobacco and vanilla, the leather of the sofa, the cotton and lavender laundry soap of Steve’s shirt. 

“I’m here,” he said. “Come on, Steve, don’t make me smack you awake.” 

Steve’s hands found him; his fingers traced their way up Tony’s shoulders, his neck, tangled in his hair. 

Another blast sounded outside; a screwdriver rolled from the workbench. 

“Tony?” Steve asked again, hoarsely. Tony tipped his head up: Steve was awake. Steve wriggled up from under him, grimaced at the door, then back at Tony. 

Steve shook his head, as if he were still trying to wake up. He looked down at his hands, glaring at them, accusatory. He bent them both, first the left and then the right, experimentally, wincing slightly. 

And then he looked back at Tony again. “None of this is real, either, is it?” 

“Sorry,” Tony said, straightening up, sliding to the far end of the sofa. 

Steve got to his feet, walked up to the clanging door, pressed his bandaged palm to it. “We’re still dreaming, aren’t we?” 

“Yeah,” Tony said. He stood and moved to the sink, splashing his face with water. “Big Midnight Racer fan, huh?” 

“ _Wherever_ did you get that idea, Stark?” Steve asked, rolling his eyes. “What I told you about the poster was true.” 

Steve turned and squinted at Tony for a moment, then reached for a coat, a hat, a mask...the gas gun, a knife, a coil of wire, the fire extinguisher-- anything, it seemed, that he could use as a weapon. He piled everything on the workbench, then began unwrapping his hands. “Why didn’t you just...tell me?” he asked. “About the dreams? About the kill switch?” 

Tony couldn’t quite bring himself to look at Steve. “That would have been too easy, right?” 

“The _hell_ , Stark!” Steve snapped. 

The door echoed with a loud slam. This time, the door showed a large dent, reverberating, the sound bouncing off all the walls of the workshop. 

“I couldn’t do it!” Tony plead. He calculated in his head: twenty-two hours in Starkesboro gave him eleven days; they’d only been in this dream for ten or twelve hours at the most. Ten and a half more days was too much; they’d both get killed here if the attackers on the other side of the door made it in, no matter what kind of arsenal Steve scrounged up for himself. 

“You couldn’t?” Steve growled through gritted teeth. “So, what, you let me watch my friends crumble to dust before my eyes? 

There was another bang; the dent grew larger, the seams in the door strained. 

“Fuck’s sake; you think I knew that would happen?” 

Steve grimaced at the gas gun; he walked to a shelf, found a bottle with a skull-and-crossbones on it, poured the contents into the gun’s cannister. 

And then Steve turned, back toward Tony, cheeks flushed, lingering hurt in his eyes. “You let me believe whatever the hell _that_ was,” he said, flicking a hand in the direction of the sofa. “Christ, Stark, is this all a game to you?” 

“Of course it’s not a--” Tony started. He swallowed. "You were happy," he muttered at the floor, looking away from Steve. He wasn't sure if Steve heard, or not.

There was another, massive slam at the door, and a creak and a strain, as the door began to fold inward. 

“This isn’t the time or the place for excuses,” Steve snapped. He took a heavy breath, snapped his mask into place, faced the door with his head down, like a bull about to charge. “I don’t even have a damn weapon.” 

Tony reached into his pocket. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, you do.” 

He tossed the tiny shield to Steve, and Steve gave him a quizzical look as he caught it, then flipped it in his hand. 

His eyes lit up, shining, and he smiled. It wasn’t a brilliant grin, just a surprised, thoughtful smile, the hard edges from his face melting away as he looked back at Tony. 

“For what it’s worth,” Tony said, “those six posters were of _you_ , not some radio show.”

“Still not the time, Tony,” Steve said, dryly. He flicked at the tiny plastic shield. “What do I do with this?” 

“Whatever the hell you want,” Tony replied. “It’s your dream.” 

Steve flipped the shield up into the air. It spun like a penny, expanding in size until it was the breadth of Steve’s shoulders, then broader, and then he caught it on his arm, aiming the now-highly-weaponized gas gun at the door as the steel crumpled, useless, and dropped to the floor. 

Tony sucked in a breath, and mentally armed himself with two repulsors-- but he didn’t need to. The first six, seven, eight, nine assailants went down like dominos. 

“How long d’you think you can keep that up?” Tony asked. 

“How long do I have to?” 

Steve bashed in a man’s head with the shield. 

“As long as it takes me to figure out a way out...we can’t wake ourselves up from inside the dream, and I had a communications device, but it’s, uh, busted.” 

Steve, with the gas gun held between his teeth, fumbled in his pocket as he fended off three more HYDRA agents, and tossed his pocketwatch back toward Tony. 

“Mrrf mrrss,” he said, around the gun. 

“What?” 

Steve pulled the gun out of his mouth just in time to shoot a man with the poison gas. “Try this,” he said. “Button on the left side. Communications device. Just stay down.” 

Tony ducked behind the workbench and squeezed the button. “JARVIS?” he tried, first. 

No answer. 

He gritted his teeth and tried again. “Ty?” 

“Ty?”

“JARVIS?”

“Ty?” 

He heard a low, soft static buzz. 

He pressed the button a few more times, but the results didn’t improve. Finally, he picked up an old radio transceiver, popped it onto the workbench and cracked it open, working the watch into the radio’s transmitter. 

“Tony!” Steve yelled. “You’ve gotta stay down!” 

“Just a minute,” Tony said. He tried the watch again. “Hello? Hello, this is Tony Stark, can anyone--” 

“Tony?” Ty’s voice came through the speaker. ”Is that you?” 

The next thing Tony knew, he was thrown back against the wall, a sharp pain shooting through his right shoulder. Blood wet his shirt, and he gritted his teeth, willing the gauntlet back onto his uninjured hand and getting off a blast. 

“I told you to--” Steve started. 

“Oh, like you ever follow orders,” Tony retorted, biting back the pain. 

Steve swung his shield again, ramming it into an assailant’s chest. “I would if they came from _me_!” 

Grimacing, Tony pulled the transceiver onto the floor. “Ty, I need you to get us out,” he said. 

“But it’s...Tony, you had me put you out for two hours; it’s only been about thirty-five minutes.” 

“We need to get out now. We used to be able to--” 

“Right,” Ty answered. “Got it. I’ll see what I can do.” 

“Fast,” Tony urged. “Remember, you take one minute, that’s twelve minutes for us.” 

He crawled across the floor on his knees and his left hand, pausing here and there to keep an eye on Steve as he neared the first aid kit. He had to crane his neck to check his shoulder: there was a narrow hole in the front of his shirt, the fabric around it damp, but he could feel warm, sticky blood on his back, and a persistent, blinding pain. 

At least the bullet had passed through, he thought, but this was going to be tricky. He couldn’t lift his right arm. With a groan, he twisted slightly, caught the fabric of his shirt collar in his teeth, and pulled until it tore, then fit a fingertip into the hole in the fabric, ripping it lengthwise so he could slide it off without lifting his arm. 

He glanced down at his chest: it was aged, battered, scarred, and he pressed a fingertip to the deepest, angriest twist in the scar tissue, the one directly over his heart. 

“Are you undressing yourself with your _teeth_?” Steve asked. 

“You say it like you think it’s the first time,” Tony retorted, as he doused a bit of surgical gauze in antiseptic and pressed it to the exit wound, hissing at it stung his flesh. 

“How long am I doing this?” Steve called back, landing a kick in someone’s stomach. 

“Ten minutes; twenty, tops, if everything works out,” Tony answered. He applied a cotton pad to the wound, holding it in place as he attempted to wrap it up in a bandage with only one hand. “You up for it?” 

Steve glanced back at Tony just long enough to shoot him a lopsided smile. “You say it like you think it’s the first time.” 

And the room jerked sideways, suddenly and without warning. 

Steve jumped-- gracefully, instinctively, as if he had known exactly when and how the floor was going to shift, and landed on his feet, with an acrobatic pirouette that ended with his shield shoved up someone’s now-very-broken nose. 

Tony, meanwhile, had crashed backward into the shelves, and in the process, slammed his wounded shoulder. “Fuck!” he yelled, as everything went momentarily white. 

“The hell is that?!” Steve asked, when the floor tilted a second time, in the opposite direction. 

“It’s Ty doing whatever the hell he has to do to get us out,” Tony explained. 

“Ty?”

“A, uh…old...” 

The floor shifted again. Steve hopped up onto the seat of a chair that tipped precariously on two narrow legs, then down, kicking the chair’s back toward the door in a single smooth motion that took out two more assailants. 

He looked back questioningly at Tony, who (if you asked him personally) was doing an admirable job of mostly staying upright. 

“You know what?” Tony said. “He’s kind of a dick, anyway, and that’s all you need to know.” 

The next time the room pitched, it spun a sheer one-eighty degrees. Tony marveled as Steve leapt into the air, hanging for a moment as if suspended, while the room revolved around him. But just as Tony felt himself hurtling toward the ceiling-that-was-now-the-floor, he realized there was one slight problem. 

“Steve!” he shouted. “You’re supposed to fall! The impact’s what wakes you up!” 

Steve gave him one short look, and curled into a cannonball, dropping like lead. 

Tony woke with a thump into a pile of leaves, gasping for breath. He took stock: his shoulder didn’t hurt anymore; his shirt was blessedly untorn, he was wearing a comfortable old pair of jeans that was starting to wear out in the crotch but that he couldn’t quite bear to part with because they had a little back pocket that was the perfect size for his custom Leatherman, and the store he’d bought them from had “converted to a lifestyle brand,” which was apparently code for changing the cut of all of their clothing because they’d decided their target audience was twenty-year-old rap stars and not forty-four-year-old businessmen-slash-superheroes who somehow weren't as much fun now that they'd had a few near-death experiences, not that he was talking about anyone in particular. There was also a rope harness tied around his waist, fastened properly with a metal carabiner, the rope was ragged at one end. 

There was another thump, not too far off, followed by a canine squeal and a rain of dry leaves in his face. 

Before he could manage to get up, Steve trotted over and licked his face. 

“Fuck, you’re still a dog. Wolf. I mean wolf,” Tony said, as he sat up, groaning. Without thinking about it, his hand found the scruff behind Steve’s ears and started scratching, until Steve’s ears lay back and his tongue lolled out of his mouth, his tail beating at the ground. 

“This is too weird,” Tony muttered.

“Yeah, it’s up there,” Steve agreed. 

“Okay, that’s even--” Tony started, but Steve’s haunches were transforming into proper legs, his front legs into arms, his muzzle shrinking into a nose, maw into mouth. 

Tony drew his hands back with surprise when he realized they were caught in Steve’s hair. 

He looked down at the tattered uniform, and shrugged. “That’s better,” he said. “Really, Tony, I don’t see why you didn’t just tell me I was dreaming.” 

“Okay, Captain Occam’s Razor,” Tony replied. “There were a lot of variables at stake. You were a wolf, for one. For another, telling people they’re dreaming doesn’t work out so good sometimes. Three, I wasn’t sure if _conscious_ you would give me the goddamn code. Four, you still can’t technically wake up. Four--” 

“You already said four,” Steve informed him. But he was smiling that same soft, wistful smile he’d worn as the Midnight Racer, and when he reached for Tony’s shoulder, he barely looked at the place where the wound had been. “I thought you were supposed to be good at math. You’re all healed up?” 

“Fine. I can say four twice if I want to,” Tony answered. “Four four four four four four four four--”

Steve cut him off with a kiss. Tony jerked back, and he instinctively felt for the shield in his pocket. 

Steve’s cheeks flushed, and he stared at Tony, mortified. “I-- I’m still-- the last dream--” he stammered, but he didn’t manage a full explanation. 

Ty hopped from a nearby tree. Tony looked up and saw the end of a rope dangling from a large, relatively low branch. It was ragged, unravelling, as if it had been hacked through with a knife. He nodded, impressed. 

“Oooh, I remember this dream,” he said, with a wink. “Not with the genuine article, of course, but I’ve got to say, well done, Tony.” 

Steve rubbed at his mouth, blinking, and got to his feet. “You must be Ty,” he said, in a monotone.

Ty grinned and held out a hand. “Captain Rogers,” he said, cheerfully. “It’s a pleasure to finally meet you. Tony and I used to play Captain America all the time. I was Captain America. Tony was...himself.” 

Ty smirked. Steve, in the middle of shaking Ty’s hand, dropped it as quickly as if Ty had told him his hand was covered in flesh-eating bacteria. 

Tony got up from the pile of leaves. “Too much information, Ty,” he said, dryly. “See, Cap? I told you this one was a peach.” 

He squinted up at the sky, half expecting to see the rest of the team staring down like gods through the monitoring system. “JARVIS?” he asked. “How’s it going with that protein chain?” 

There was a long pause. 

“I’ve only had it for a minute and a half, Sir,” JARVIS pointed out. “But if I could extract you and Mister Stone from the system…” 

Tony hesitated, looking over to Steve, who had managed to transform his uniform into a plain white tee shirt and jeans that, Tony noticed, with some amusement, were identical to Tony’s own. 

“What about Cap?” he asked. 

“While I would love to have the ability to instantaneously analyze and synthesize this protein chain, Sir,” JARVIS answered, “You and I both are eminently aware of how oblique some of your father’s notations could be.”

“Well, Ty can go home,” Tony offered. “There any reason I can’t do the calculations from in here?” He splayed his hand out, so that his fingertips just barely brushed the back of Steve’s hand. 

“The time differential is still going to affect your ability to communicate with me, Sir. I recommend returning-- the effect of calculating variables in a space where science needn’t follow natural laws--”

“I’ll be fine,” Steve assured him. “I won’t turn into a wolf or a frog or--”

Tony grinned. “You read that one, too!” He rubbed at his forehead. “Sure, J, bring us home; just gimme one minute here to say--” 

“TONY!” Steve shouted, and he shoved Tony to the ground, just as the gun in Ty’s hands went off.

And then there was blood, so much blood, and Tony wasn’t sure where it was coming from, or why it was there, but his vision was slipping away. 

“JARVIS, get him out of here!” Steve screamed. “Get him--”

There was another gunshot, but it sounded muffled and far away. 

“Stay here, Tony,” Steve pleaded. “Stay with me. Just a--”


	8. Waiting Game

Tony woke up. There was a slow, even beeping in his ear-- he was attached to a heart rate monitor, and he frowned, twisting in the hospital bed to see it. 

Beside him, a metal chair squeaked against the tile floor. 

“You’re up,” Steve said, and he got to his feet, grasping for Tony’s hand.

“You’re--” Tony frowned. “ _You’re_ up?” 

“You’ve been out for days, Tony,” Steve said quietly. He brushed his thumb over the back of Tony’s hand. “I don’t know what happened; JARVIS said it was the shock, or…” 

“J?” Tony asked. “I’m gonna want a look at my brainwaves.” 

“Absolutely, Sir,” replied JARVIS. “May I suggest you eat something first?” 

Tony let out a long-suffering sigh. “Fiiiiine, JARVIS. Get me a dozen of those creme brulee doughnuts from Doughnut Plant, and, like, a giant Doctor Pepper?” 

“For your first meal in days?” Steve asked, arching an eyebrow at him. “J, get him some chicken soup.” 

“With doughnuts floating in it, please, JARVIS.”

“I’ll use my discretion, Sir.” 

“I’ll unplug you if you do,” Tony said in a singsong. 

“You’re a terrible patient,” Steve said, fondly. 

Tony yanked the heart monitor off, and pulled out the IV from his arm with the practiced motions of someone very experienced at checking out of hospitals without clearance from his doctors. He sat up on the edge of the bed, peered down at his chest, poking at the ugly scar tissue, and then reached for his pocket to check the shield. 

Pajamas. No pockets. 

“What are you looking for?” Steve asked, a question in his eyes. 

“My, uh, you know.” He patted his hip, where his pocket should be. “Shield.” 

Steve pointed to it, resting on the bedside table. It was aged, pitted, the paint faded away. 

Tony reached for it, picked it up, and pretended to fumble it, so it fell to the floor, where it landed solidly, without so much as a tiny skip. 

Tony smiled, let out a long, slow breath, and reached back for Steve’s hand. “You want to blow this banana stand?” 

Steve’s hand tightened around Tony’s-- almost too tight, Tony thought, as if he still didn’t know his own strength, and he nodded. 

“Yeah,” he said, and there was a note of hope in his voice, staring at their entwined fingers. “Yeah, I’d like that.” 

“J, can you notify the rest of the team I’m awake, and--” Tony frowned. “Where _is_ everyone else? Scattered to the wind again?”

“No,” Steve said. “They...we had a talk. Everyone-- we decided to take you up on your invitation.”

Tony grinned. “To stay? Here?”

Steve’s head bobbed up and down happily. “Yeah, after...everything...Tony, I know it’s what you wanted, so I...sort of talked everyone else around.” 

Tony whistled. “Wonders never cease. So...where’s everybody now?” 

“Dealing with your pal Stone,” Steve explained, giving Tony a tentative look. “I volunteered to stay with you.” 

Tony hopped off the bed, his toes curling as his bare feet hit the cold floor. “Thanks. I, uh...I think?” 

“Sheesh,” he said, letting go of Steve’s hand. “I really have to do something about the floor.”

“Tony?” Steve said, hesitantly. 

“Better insulation, or, hell, I bet I could just heat the whole thing; climate-controlled flooring, I’ve got to make that, don’t I?” 

“ _Tony_ ,” Steve repeated, more urgently. 

“What?” Tony asked. “Do you have a better idea? Or...socks,” he said, moving to his desk and rifling through the drawers until he found a mismatched pair of socks, and pulled them on his feet. 

“Better,” he said, happily.

“You’re being…” Steve looked up at the ceiling. “Circuitous.” 

“Circuitous?” Tony asked. “How? I went directly to my socks.” 

“I’ve been waiting…days…for you to wake up,” Steve said, in that plain, earnest way that Steve had of making everything sound _important_. 

Tony scrubbed his fingers through his hair; it didn’t feel _too_ wretched even after several days’ sleep. “What do you want me say, Steve?” he asked. “Hey, I just wrecked everything with the woman I thought I’d marry, so let’s go for broke and wreck things with the guy I’ve been in unabashed love with since I was a kid?” 

Steve just looked at him, his expression crumpling, and then he shook his head, looked down, kicked at the floor. Instantly, Tony recalled the little boy with the injured pigeon and winced. “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t think of it like that. I thought you-- I don’t know what I thought.” 

Now Steve sounded more exasperated with himself than anything else. That, Tony could deal with. “I _do_ ,” he said, a little grudgingly. “And I...not to sound like a total creeper or anything, but it would be fucking ridiculous for anybody to spend that much time in your head and see what makes you tick and _not_. But I…” 

He stepped back to the hospital bed, picked up the plastic shield, flipped it in his fingers, clasped it tightly in his hand until it felt warm to the touch. “Need a few days.” 

Steve nodded slowly. “A few days, I can do,” he agreed. “I’ve got all the time in the world.”

* * *

“Pepper?” Tony asked, when Pepper came to bring him some contract or another to sign off on, and Tony put aside the brain wave readouts from his time in Steve’s head, which looked just about as normal as he could hope. “I have a question.” 

“The answer is probably no,” she said, sweetly. 

“Even if the question is Steve Rogers?” Tony asked.

Pepper coughed, then quickly regained her composure. “Ask Natasha.”

“Natasha told me it was a great idea,” Tony said. “You know Nat. She’s the founder and President of the Get-Steve-Laid-Club-of-America-And-Ladies’-Auxiliary.” 

“So you want to be talked out of it?” Pepper asked, chewing her lip. “Then I think you know what the answer is.” 

“I want…” Tony frowned. “I don’t want to fuck anything else up.” 

“And what does Steve think?” Pepper asked. 

“What?” Tony pulled up Steve’s brain wave readouts, scrutinizing the same section he’d pored over a hundred times, the section that corresponded to that first kiss, Steve with the gas gun in his bandaged hand. He’d tried desperately to find something in it that set it apart from the rest of the reading, but the data was uniform. “I don’t know. I don’t see what that--” 

“You’re _reading his printouts_ ,” Pepper observed, incredulous. “Tony, do you even-- why don’t you _ask_ him?” 

“I thought maybe if I could analyze the data first, I wouldn’t have to go to the trouble,” Tony explained. 

Pepper sighed.

“Ask him?” Tony asked. 

“ _Ask him_ ,” Pepper answered. “Leave me out of it.”

* * *

But Steve was nowhere to be found, and after a thorough search of the Tower, including all of the kitchens, Tony still came up empty-handed. 

“He’s out looking for Barnes again,” Natasha told him. 

“Already?” Tony asked. “After the kill switch bullshit and everything? Does the man have no--” And then he remembered what Bucky had said, in Steve’s dream, about ideals and common sense. 

Tony had gotten back in the habit of carrying his little plastic shield with him everywhere again, and he turned it over in his pocket. Someone had dumped a huge lot of his favorite jeans on eBay, he’d discovered, and he’d bought twenty pairs, which, at his calculations of going through three pairs a year, would last him nearly seven years, and by then, he’d be fifty and probably would have to switch to some kind of old man pants, by law. 

“It’s been almost two weeks, Stark,” Natasha pointed out. “And Wilson’s with him.”

“Oh.” Tony frowned, counted back. “So it has.” Still, privately, after everything he’d seen in Steve’s subconscious, he thought it was too soon. He suspected the man Steve was searching for would agree. 

He sent Steve a single text message: _Ready when you are_.

Steve replied: _Back home tonight_. Tony smiled slightly when he realized that Steve had stopped _signing_ his text messages, the way he had when they’d first given him a phone two years earlier. 

Steve didn’t say what ‘tonight’ meant, and by six, Tony was pacing the floor of the lab, much to Bruce’s amusement. 

“It’s not _funny_ ,” Tony complained, starting to regret having ever told Bruce anything, after the fifth or sixth ‘star-spangled’ pun. 

“It’s _hilarious_ ,” Bruce answered. “But if it’s making you nervous, I’ll clear out.”

That left Tony alone in the lab, and he kicked his feet up on the sofa, picking up a random back issue of _Popular Mechanics_. But the magazine fell open to an article about _Tiberius Stone_ , of all people, and he wrinkled his nose in irritation, tossing the magazine into the wastebasket unread. 

Steve showed up a little before eight, in full uniform, the stars-and-stripey-spangly one, not the more subdued one he wore for most ops these days. His cowl was pulled back, his hair sticking up at all angles. He unhooked his shield from his back and lowered it to the floor. “Evening,” he said, with a half-smile that seemed almost shy, deferential. 

“Hey, Cap,” Tony said, straightening up, taking his shoes off the furniture. “You, uh, you came straight here?” 

“No, I put on the uniform just for the occasion,” Steve answered. He stalked over toward Tony, put his hands on his hips-- his _incredibly well-defined hips_ , as was evident in the nearly skin-tight uniform-- and looked around the room. 

“Brucey’s gone for the night,” Tony said, and he shifted all the way over to one side of the couch. 

Steve nodded and sat down at the other end, leaning forward, resting his elbows against his knees. “Uh. Natasha keeps asking me if we--”

“I know what Nat keeps asking you,” Tony assured him. “But all crassness aside-- well, okay, maybe a little bit of crassness, just a tiny bit-- Steve. I know what I’m thinking. I’ve had a kiddie crush on you since I was four years old; you provided the backdrop to a hell of a lot of my sexual awakening--”

“Too much detail, Tony,” Steve said, his ears going pink. 

“I want to know what the hell _you’re_ thinking,” Tony answered. “Because, let’s face it, this is a pretty sharp one-eighty from you disapproving of eighty-two-point-six percent of everything I do.”

Steve frowned. “That’s a very specific number,” he observed.

“I know. I calculated it. I was going to make a slideshow to refresh your memory, but then I thought--”

“That would be a bit much.” 

“That’s what I thought!” Tony exclaimed cheerily. He ran his hands through his hair. “I’m just...I’m having a hard time believing this isn’t some weirdo residual dream-thing for you, you know, left over from me being in your head playing Ambiguously Gay Duo there, for a while. I keep-- I keep going over the data, but--”

Steve hid his head in his hands. It took Tony a few seconds to realize he was laughing. “You-- you’re trying to find scientific evidence to explain away the fact that I can’t stop thinking about you,” he said, shaking his head. 

He looked up at Tony, more serious. “Why won’t you just trust me? When, in all the time that I’ve known you, have I ever not been less than certain, when I said there was something I wanted.” 

“I remember you really waffling about broccoli on pizza that one--” 

Steve crawled across the sofa, grasped Tony by the shoulder, pushed him back against the armrest. Tony’s pulse quickened, his breath grew short, his face went hot, and he squirmed under Steve’s grasp, sucking in a deep breath. Steve’s scent was different here than it had been in the dreams: sweat and leather, shaving cream and Ivory soap. 

“…time…” 

Steve’s other hand cupped Tony’s face; he was still in gloves, the leather rubbing up against Tony’s cheek, the callused pads of his fingertips pressing against his temple. 

“You know I don’t play games. If you keep making excuses,” Steve murmured in his ear, “I’ll get up and walk away, no questions asked.” 

Tony’s breath hitched. “Don’t,” he managed. 

Steve kissed him, hard, hungrily, pushing Tony back against the sofa as his teeth raked Tony’s lower lip. He tossed his gloves to the floor, sliding one hand beneath Tony’s shirt, unbuckling Tony’s belt with the other. 

“You sure move fast,” Tony observed breathlessly, as he tried to find some way to unfasten Steve’s uniform. 

“I told you,” Steve answered, his mouth moving along Tony’s jaw, leaving a row of desperate kisses before he caught Tony’s earlobe between his teeth. “I know what I want.” 

Tony gasped. 

“Do you want me to slow down?” Steve asked, running a single finger along the inseam of Tony’s incredible, perfectly-cut jeans. 

“Nnnggh,” Tony answered, head swimming as he tugged at Steve’s shirt. “How the hell does this come off? It’s got like a million zippers.” 

“Six zippers,” Steve answered, and he sat back up, straddling Tony’s hips with his knees. He reached back over his shoulder with one massive arm, and pulled, and Tony held his breath at the sound of zipper teeth parting. 

Steve tugged at a sleeve, and the top of his uniform fell away, leaving nothing but a too-flimsy, too-tight undershirt, soaked with sweat so that it was translucent in places. Tony bit his lip, and twisted his fingers around a handful of fabric, tugged Steve back down to him. 

Steve kissed him more gently now, cradling Tony’s head in his hands, winding his fingers through Tony’s hair. “Better?” he asked, and he pressed a kiss to Tony’s clavicle, just above Tony’s own shirt collar. 

“Much,” Tony answered. He hand traveled down Steve’s chest-- slowly, slowly, marveling at the fact that those muscles were _real_ , even as he tipped his head, baring his neck for Steve to kiss. 

Tony’s head was swimming; he grasped at one of Steve’s hands, pushed it down, toward the zipper on his jean. “Yeah,” he whispered back. “Whatever-- whatever you say.” 

“Say it,” Steve coaxed. “you’re mine,” he murmured. “Just mine.”

He slid a finger down, just beneath the waistband of Steve’s ridiculous Captain America pants (that were of course armed with even more zippers and buckles than his shirt) teasing it across Steve’s hipbone. 

Steve clutched at Tony’s shoulders, groaned, and pressed his mouth to Tony’s ear. “Say: ‘I’m--’”

“Tony!” 

Tony started, blinking, at the shout from the door, the voice that sounded urgent, desperate-- and decidedly like Steve’s. 

“JARVIS,” Steve snapped. “There’s an intruder in the lab; did I not expressly instruct--” 

Tony groaned, put a hand to his head.

“I’m sorry, Captain,” said JARVIS. “Your identification data...my systems indicated…”

“ _Tony_ ,” said...well. That was also Steve, wasn’t it, cheeks red, breathing heavily, soaking wet-- completely, soaking wet from head to toe, dressed in an ill-fitting SHIELD-issued tee shirt and a grubby sweatshirt Tony had seen a million times. 

He crossed the room with long strides, and Tony sat up straight, just as the Steve on the sofa stood, putting himself between Tony and the dripping-wet Steve. 

“Who the hell are you?” his Steve demanded. 

“I’m Steve Rogers; who the hell are you?” the wet Steve answered. 

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Tony mumbled into his hands. 

“Tony,” said the wet Steve. “Tony, you’re _dreaming._ Check your shield.” 

“I…” Tony pulled the shield from his pocket, held up its worn surface. “I did; it’s right; I’m not--” 

But he went cold. 

His Steve narrowed his eyes. “You’re some kind of imposter; Tony, who has the data for the LMD project? Could it have been leaked?” 

“SHIELD had it as part of the settlement against-- _fuck_ ,” Tony growled. 

“Stone shot you,” said the wet Steve. He ducked to one side, tried to look Tony in the eye, but Tony’s Steve shifted, blocking his view again. 

“Stay away from him!” 

“You didn’t make it back,” said the wet Steve.

“That’s not true,” said the dry Steve. “JARVIS pulled you out at the last minute. JARVIS, confirm?” 

“Of course,” said JARVIS, who started projecting a hologram recording of brainwave data. “As you can see, here is the point where your delta waves--”

“He’s controlling the dream, Tony!” the wet Steve snapped. “He’s controlling all the data.”

“Oh, goddammit,” said the dry Steve, hitting his head with the heel of his palm. “If we’re asleep, why don’t you shoot yourself in the head?” 

“Not without Stark,” said the wet Steve. 

Tony craned his neck to see what was going on. 

The wet Steve raised an eyebrow, challenging, as he produced a pistol and tossed it into the air, letting it arc high, spinning in perfect spirals over the dry Steve’s head. “Catch!”

Tony caught the gun, but, now, with it in his hands, was utterly at a loss as to what to do with it. 

“He wants you to kill yourself,” the dry Steve said, urgently, holding a hand out to Tony. “Tony, give me the gun, give-- you know you won’t wake up from this. He’ll--”

The dry Steve spun to face the wet Steve again. “Who sent you? Who do you work for?” 

“Tony,” said the wet Steve, ignoring the dry Steve’s demands. “Tony, please…” He took a deep breath. “Do you still trust me?” 

“What?” Tony asked.

The dry Steve aimed a punch at the wet Steve’s jaw. The wet Steve stumbled backward, taken off-guard, but he recovered quickly and slammed an elbow into the dry Steve’s chest. 

Now the dry Steve fell back, regained his balance, and kicked at the wet Steve’s head. The wet Steve jumped back from the blow. 

Tony watched, mesmerized by the sight of _two_ Captain Americas in translucent shirts fighting each other.

“It’s what you asked me before,” said the wet Steve. “I need you to say it. Do you trust me?” 

Tony took a step back, realizing his mouth was agape. He snapped his jaw shut. “I don’t even know who you--” 

“Trust me,” said the wet Steve, plaintively. “Shoot me, and then you.” 

Those were-- _were_ those Tony’s words? 

Tony pointed the gun at the wet Steve. 

“Tony, he’s lying,” said the dry Steve. “He wants you dead, he-- don’t listen--”

Tony’s hands shook on the gun; his palms were sweating. 

The wet Steve took a deep breath. “I never met a girl who makes me feel the way that you do,” he sang, slowly, almost cautiously. 

“Really?” asked the dry Steve, with a derisive laugh.

“Whenever I’m asked who makes my dreams real,” sang the wet Steve.

Tony frowned. “That’s the Temp-- _fuck it_ ,” he growled, aimed the gun at the wet Steve and pulled the trigger. 

But he missed, the bullet smashing into his cold storage unit; the glass door shattering, the icy air escaping. 

The dry Steve grabbed Tony’s arm. He was so much larger, so much stronger, he wrestled the gun away without much effort. 

“Are you insane?!” he demanded. 

Tony, at a loss for what to do, stepped on his foot. “No, Ty,” he snapped. “I think that title pretty definitively belongs to you.” 

Ty, still looking just like Steve, lunged at Tony, snatching him up by the waist. He raised the gun at the wet-- at _Steve_. “Get the hell out of here. He’s _mine_.”

“Uh, do I not have a say in this?” Tony asked, as he kicked and squirmed to be released. 

Steve stood there, still for a moment, but Tony could see his eyes moving quickly, surveying the room. “He needs to come home,” Steve said, his tone urgent. “You can’t-- you can’t really expect to keep him here.” 

“This is where we belong,” Ty said, his voice rising to a frantic pitch. “It’s where we’ve always belonged. We’re _kings_ here.” 

Ty fired the gun, but Steve was already diving for the shield Ty had left against the wall. The bullet grazed his side, but he rolled, catching the shield in one hand and curling into a tight ball, so he was entirely protected by it. 

Ty fired again, desperately, since there was no logical way he could hit Steve, not now. 

And then Steve hopped to his feet, and threw the shield. 

The last thing Tony saw was the spinning stripes of the shield, whirling directly at his eyes.


	9. We Are Free

Tony woke up. 

Bruce was standing just above, a panicked look on his face. “Tony?” he asked. “Your readings went full delta, there. Are you--”

Tony nodded. “Fine,” he said. “You’re going to need to restrain Stone, though.” He jabbed a thumb at Ty, shuddering. “How are we doing with Steve’s code?” 

Natasha wandered over, armed with a zip tie gun. “Stark, it’s been less than a minute; you can’t expect us to--”

Tony ran his hands over his face and groaned. “Right, okay, it just…” 

He pulled the shield out of his pocket, eyed its worn, unpainted surface, and dropped it to the floor, where it rested without bouncing. Instead of being reassured, he felt bile rising in his belly. 

He retched, and Bruce handed him a bowl. He heard the sound of a faucet running, and a moment later, Wilson was there with a glass of water.

Tony swallowed it down in one gulp. “Uh.” 

He looked around the room, frantically, for something, something that would tell him this was the real world. Finally, he grimaced, and turned to Natasha, who had Ty zip-tied to the hospital bed in at least a dozen points, with bright, rainbow-colored zip ties.

“I’m calling the cops,” Natasha said, glaring at the still-sleeping Ty. “Otherwise I’m going to murder someone, and since I’m not technically a government agent at the moment, that’s probably ill-advised.” 

“I’ve been zip-tied to a bed,” Tony observed, and he went cold. Dreams drew from memories, this could still be a dream, he wasn’t sure… 

He swore under his breath. “Nat?” he asked, a little bit grudgingly. 

“What?” 

“If I asked you if it was a good idea to, uh, bone Captain America--”

WIlson coughed, loudly. 

“First of all,” Natasha said. “English may be my second language, but I’m pretty sure no one over the age of sixteen says ‘bone,’ and you know as well as I do that that’s the worst idea--”

That was good enough. Tony let out a sigh of relief. “I’m just, uh, checking,” he said, and he leaned back, his heart rate slowly returning to normal. 

“You need to send me back in,” he said, after a moment. 

“What?” Bruce asked. 

“I’ve gotta check on Steve,” he said, glancing over at the curtained area. “Some...uh, some stuff went down.”

* * *

There was something about the room he couldn’t quite place, Tony thought, something familiar, though he knew he’d never seen the furniture. It was all sleek, modern, comfortable, and he put down the bottle of scotch in his hand, raising his glass to his lips without thinking.

He spit it back into the glass, trying to smack the noxious taste out of his mouth. “ _Steve_ ,” he groaned. 

Steve’s head popped in from the next room. “Well,” he said. “Hey. So nice of you to drop by, let yourself in, why don’t you?” 

Relief washed over Tony. “Your taste in liquor is shit, Cap.” 

“What?” Steve frowned at the bottle. “I thought you liked this.” 

“Let me bring the wine next time, is all I’m saying,” Tony retorted. 

Steve held up a bowl of familiar, toxic orange, squiggly things. “You like cheese puffs, at least, right?” 

Tony grinned and munched on a handful in answer, licking yellow-orange fake cheese powder from his fingers with relish. 

Steve carried the cheese puffs and a beer out into a seating area, where a black leather sofa faced a huge, wall-size television. 

“This is the first time you’re seeing the place furnished, isn’t it?” Steve asked, as Tony perused his impressive collection of pulpy science fiction DVDs. “Hey, I’m sorry, do you want a beer?” 

“Sure.” Tony took his hands off a copy of _Superman_ , starring Nicolas Cage, to look around. “I...yeah,” he said, as he realized where they were. 

“I like what you’ve done with the place,” he said, a grin spreading across his face. “Listen, I’m...uh. I’m glad you took me up on the offer after all. It would’ve been sad, an Avengers Tower with no Avengers.” 

Steve returned with another beer and plopped down on the sofa. “Well, you made some good points. We can do more, as a team, right?” 

“Yeah,” Tony agreed, accepting the beer. He took a swig as he sat down, too, on the sofa. At least the beer tasted like real beer, even if it was maltier than Tony preferred. 

Steve clicked a button on a remote, and a stereo came on, softly playing a Temptations record. 

Tony cringed and took another sip of beer. “Steve,” he said. “There’s something I’ve gotta say, up front this time.” 

Steve looked at him, nodded, expectantly. “What is it?” 

“This is a dream.” 

Steve clutched at his beer bottle with both hands, and smiled. “I know,” he said. “I just...didn’t know if you did.” 

Tony ran his tongue over his teeth. “I’ve only got a little while. I’ve gotta get out of here, and go fix the hell out of your stupid serum so you’re not stuck down here for days.” 

“I dunno,” Steve said, leaning back on the sofa. “It’s pretty cozy.” He gave Tony a sidelong glance. “I’m thinking about moving into the real one.” 

That took Tony by surprise. He put down his beer. “Yeah?” he asked. “What convinced you?” 

Steve gave him a soft smile, clearing his throat. “Ah. Probably the owner.” 

Tony rubbed at his chin. “Look, Steve,” he said. “I’m sorry, about the bullshit with Ty, and the-- I mean, you told me to be more fucking careful about who I trust, and I went right ahead and--”

Steve shrugged. “You thought he was me,” he answered. 

Tony felt his face heating up; he was quite sure his ears were a violent shade of red. “Uh, yeah, I’m sorry about that, too.” 

“I hope you’re not _that_ sorry,” Steve said, raising an eyebrow. He picked his beer back up.

Tony almost choked. “Uh. Are you...can you rephrase that for someone who’s an absolute idiot?” 

Steve rolled his eyes. “Goddammit, Tony, do I have to make the first move in _every_ dream?” 

Tony laughed. “That--” he managed. “Depends whose dream it is.” 

Then Steve started to laugh, and snorted beer out his nostrils, which wasn’t quite how Tony had fantasized this scene playing out, and that only made him laugh harder, and of course, then, Steve laughed harder, and by the time Tony managed to rein his laughter in, he was hiccuping. Badly. 

Steve straightened up, looking amused, and patted him on the back. Tony hiccuped again. 

“Mine,” Steve said. “My dream. Why the hell do you have hiccups if this is a dream?” 

Tony hiccuped on more time, and then they promptly subsided. He smiled, a little crookedly, and, very delicately ran a hand through Steve’s hair, moving closer. 

“Just a warning,” Tony said. “I’ve literally only got twenty minutes, here.” 

_This_ Steve smelled like cheese puffs and beer, like Mountain Fresh-scented deodorant and fabric softener. 

“Then we’ll pick up where we left off when I wake up.” 

Tony kissed him, tentatively, at first, and then harder, as Steve tugged him into his lap. 

“You taste like fake cheese,” Tony observed. 

“So do you,” Steve pointed out. “Quit complaining.” 

Tony shifted in Steve’s lap. He reached into his pocket, his fingers fumbling around the shield. He picked it up, without looking at it, and dropped it behind the sofa, where he couldn’t see whether it bounced or not.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Armistice (The Nothing Else Matters Remix)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5938774) by [Sineala](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sineala/pseuds/Sineala)




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